The End
by anonfanficaccount
Summary: 1996: Markus flees for his life, but he doesn't know why. 2029: Erica makes a documentary. John Connor is losing it, but he has a plan. Can they save the human race from extinction? Alternate timeline, mostly OCs.
1. Chapter 1

Content Warning: See author's profile for details (don't spoil it for yourself if you don't have to – it's not that bad. Honest)

* * *

Tuesday 27th August 1996 – 2.34pm

The house phone rang.

"Mom?" Markus stopped to listen for a response. "Mooooooom... Mooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmm?"

Still nothing. Then Markus suddenly remembered she'd taken Felicity shopping. Dad was at mass, so, sighing, Markus tucked the shirt he was folding into the bottom of his suitcase and shuffled down the long hall.

"Hello?"

"Is this Markus Sackhoff?"

Markus didn't recognise the voice, but it was female.

"Uh, yeah."

"I need you to listen. It's not safe. Get your family and get out. Go somewhere you've never been before, stay away from everyone you know and hide. I'll send someone to find you."

Markus had no idea how to respond to this.

"Um... yeah... right. Who is this?"

"Get out Markus. You have about two days before he finds you."

The phone line died. Markus stood there for a few moments. What are you supposed to do after a call like that? He decided to ignore it, went back to packing all his stuff and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

* * *

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 8.37am

"Erica, she's back!" Neil rushed towards them. He grabbed Erica's hand and started to drag her across the crowded room, but Erica pulled away.

"I'll be back in a minute Mom." She fixed her mother's blanket, checked the level of water in the glass on the floor by her bed. Neil danced with impatience. Erica touched her mother's face gently, waking her fully from her half-doze.

"I'll be right back," she repeated. Her mother groaned in response and turned away. Erica sighed and allowed Neil to pull her off. They ran full pelt across the vast busy room, dodging make-shift cots and people who were shuffling about the business of getting up. Once word spread, they would follow in their masses, but for the moment it was a normal morning.

"Erica, where are you going?" a croaky voice called from a under a blanket from the left. A gnarled old face appeared from its depths. "She's back Mr. Sansom, she's back!"

A murmur raced around the surrounding cots. There was a flurry of movement as people began to follow them. Had Erica and Neil turned around, they would have seen the rumour ripple across the room, followed by a lot of hurried activity, but they were already out of the door, splashing down the cramped tunnel. A pipe had burst sometime last week, and they still hadn't gotten around to cleaning up properly; there'd been a big assault on a work-camp the next day, and almost all the maintenance crew had been re-assigned. They'd suffered heavy losses and they were left short. Still, someone would get to it eventually.

Two minutes later they arrived in the barn. Without needing to discuss it, they headed to the back and climbed the stairs. The best view was always from the balcony. The room was already pretty full, but they didn't have much trouble pushing their way to the front.

Then they waited. She'd have to be de-briefed by Connor and probably Sackhoff and one or two others. Then they'd decide exactly how much to reveal to the waiting masses. They were very careful about this – it was impossible to tell exactly how many skin-jobs were hiding in the crowd, although their numbers had been so depleted lately that a newcomer would be easily recognised.

There'd been rumours that they'd begun replacing captured members of the resistance, but everyone was checked out thoroughly after rescue, and for security reasons, no-one but the soldiers were allowed leave the camp. Still, the idea that someone you'd known since childhood could turn around one day and blow your head off...

* * *

Thursday 29th August 1996 – 9.17am

Almost everything Markus owned was stuffed into the car. They'd played a very complicated game of tetris with suitcases of clothes, an old computer, duvets, pillows, books, and a whole host of other things that Markus probably would never need.

The roof rack was over-loaded too – bike, surfboard and kayak were piled on top of each other, strapped down tightly. The kayak paddle ran along the middle of the car, from the back wind-shield to the front. There was just about room in the car for himself, Felicity and his parents.

They settled in for the long drive. Markus' mother handed out hard boiled sweets while remarking "I don't know when or how you're going to need a surfboard or a kayak in New York City dear. You won't even have a car to get them anywhere."

It was not the first time this particular point had been brought up, but Markus didn't care. He wanted them with him, and he was going to find a way to use them, so he ignored her and said to Felicity; "it'll be your turn next lil'sis'. Six years time. Still want to be an astronaut?"

This wasn't as outlandish as when other twelve year olds said they wanted to be an astronaut. Felicity was smart, fearless and determined. She hadn't come across anything she really wanted before that she hadn't gotten, and Markus saw no reason that this should be any different.

She shrugged. "Better than studying philosophy, dear brother. I'm really not sure what you're planning on doing with that degree."

Markus didn't know either, but he decided to ignore her too.

"Why do I have to come anyway Mom? I was going to go to the Mall with Brit."

"The Mall? How unlike you," Markus teased. Felicity glared at him.

"You have to come to say goodbye to your brother. You probably won't see him again for quite a while."

This set Markus thinking – how long would it actually be? At least Christmas anyway. It was too long to travel just for the weekend. He had this sudden premonition that he'd never see them again, and the phone call he'd gotten the other day sprung into mind, but he shrugged it off.

"Anyway, you can't stay at home on your own for a few days. And we're going to see Les Mis tomorrow night, and you'll like the hotel - there's a spa."

If the thought of going to see a Broadway show and having a massage was supposed to appease Felicity, her parents didn't know her very well. She detested musicals with a passion and didn't like people touching her, so she stared angrily out the window for the next half hour. But Felicity, having a naturally talkative disposition, eventually got over it and chatted happily until Markus began to fantasize about hitting her over the head with something very heavy.

Two or three hours later they pulled in at a gas station. Everyone got out to stretch their legs – as Felicity said, "I just want to stand up." Their mother, Nancy, began to fill the tank, while their father, James, went to buy something full of saturated fat for lunch.

Markus headed for the bathroom. On his way, a battered old puce volvo pulled in. The driver, a very large, very intense man, stared at Markus very intently, but Markus didn't notice him.

For the next few hours, the puce volvo trailed them, but there was nothing unusual about this; they were on the motorway, and everyone had to follow everyone for as long as they were driving. The volvo blended in about three cars behind, and didn't do anything suspicious, so none of them even saw it.

Felicity tired out and fell asleep, and James began to give Markus unsolicited advice. "Don't borrow money – everyone else will be as broke as you are. And no drugs. Always use a condom." This received a scandalized "James!" from Nancy – both of Markus' parents were very religious, but James was a little more pragmatic about things like college students having sex before marriage.

In any case, James continued as though she hadn't said anything. "Don't leave your assignments until 4am the night before. Take out the bins in the kitchen every once in a while, your room-mates will love you for it." This went on for the rest of the journey.

* * *

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 9.35 am

The crowd was seriously impatient. Erica shifted from aching foot to equally sore foot. This de-brief was taking longer than usual. In Erica's experience, this was either very good or very bad. She should be dying to get back to her mother, but in truth, she was glad of the break. She'd barely left her bedside since she'd taken a turn for the worse a few days ago. The medic said it didn't look good, and he'd send in the doctor as soon as she got back from camp thirty-four, but there was no telling when that would be – the machines patrolled the route much more frequently now.

Camp thirty-four. There'd been ninety-seven once, all over the country – no telling how many across the world, but they'd slowly lost touch, more and more in the last few months. Some had purposely gone out of contact for security reasons – though Erica wasn't too clear on what those security reasons were.

They were down to thirteen that they could be sure of. This one, camp nineteen, was one of the biggest, and had once held over 8,000 people, but that had been in the beginning, before Erica had been born. Since then, the war had claimed many, but disease and starvation had killed even more. Those who signed up to fight got more rations than everyone else, but these days that was a death sentence too.

Finally, another half-hour later, the door opened. They'd made a make-shift stage at the front out of some old tables. John Connor and Markus Sackhoff – his second-in-command - clambered up. Both were middle-aged – ancient these days, and now retired to command, but both had proved themselves in battle more than almost anyone else.

There was no mic, no way of projecting their voices and even shouting as loud as they could, it was difficult for those at the back to hear. The audience went completely silent as they began to talk.

"Around 8 o clock this morning, our informant within the Skynet ranks returned." This sentence was remarkable for many reasons. For starters, every informant that had tried to infiltrate Skynet had been pretty much immediately detected and killed. This one, Alison, was the only one to succeed, and the only one to return. For a very good reason – she was one of them.

"We have received information that will allow us to strike a massive – possibly fatal - blow to the machines." A shocked murmur rippled through the room. This wasn't possible. It couldn't be true. The idea of an end to the war was something everyone had stopped hoping for a very long time ago; it had been only a matter of time before the human race was extinguished completely.

Connor silenced them with a wave of his hand. "This is what I have been hoping for. But it will be dangerous. We will need every single body capable of holding a gun. I am lowering the age for joining the resistance from seventeen to fourteen. And it is now mandatory, barring -" the audience was no longer silent. A furious buzzing came from them and people began to push forward through the crowd. Erica was not sure what they intended to do, but it could not be good. "-barring a valid cert from one of our medics".

Oh god. It dawned on Erica. She'd just turned seventeen, and had no intentions to ever join the fight – how could she with her mother... – but that was an excuse really, she'd always thought she was too much of a coward to ever... But now there was no choice. Her heart fluttered. She couldn't breathe, she felt faint. She grabbed Neil's shoulder for support. He – usually so attentive, was wrapped up in his own thoughts.

"I cannot reveal the nature of the plan at this moment" - that wasn't unusual, everything was on a need to know basis. "But we have a very short window of opportunity to make this work. Training for all our new recruits will begin today at 10.30 hours." Connor didn't seem to quite understand how his speech was affecting the people gathered in front of him.

Erica glanced at her watch – it was 10.11 now. 19 minutes. Shit.

Sackhoff clambered off the table, and Connor went to follow him but turned back around. Erica saw him look wordlessly at the seething crowd, searching their faces for something. She didn't know what, but he left, clearly dissatisfied.


	2. Chapter 2

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 10.12am

A boy, around eight, wove his way through the crowd. Erica recognised him. He lived in the mart. She couldn't remember his name. He stopped right in front of her, drew himself up to his full four-foot-nine-inches and announced, in his best I-Have-A-Very-Important-Message voice, "Connor needs to see you. Now."

Wait, what? No, seriously, what?

Erica hadn't even known Connor knew her name, let alone needed her for anything. It had to be a mistake. Everyone nearby turned to stare at her. Extremely uncomfortable, she and Neil pushed their way through the crowd, avoiding everyone's gaze. They finally escaped into the hall, and Erica silently followed Neil into a nearby store room.

They still didn't speak for a moment, but then;

"What are we going to do?" Neil stared Erica in the eye.

She shrugged. "What we're told, I guess."

"I can't do this Erica, I can't fight." This surprised her. It was everything he'd ever wanted since he was a child; but now there was a look of sheer terror in his eyes, and he turned his face away. "I can't."

But she understood. The reality of doing something like this was entirely different from the idea of it. After years and years of his applications being refused for psychological reasons, he'd gotten used to the idea of never having to fight.

She was surprised to find a strength in herself that she hadn't known she had. The more she thought about it, the less the idea of going to fight scared her. Her people needed this. And, she didn't want to think this, but the thought kept coming – she could get away from her mother.

She loved her mother, she truly did, but watching her deteriorate, spending her entire life sitting by her bed anticipating her every need was slowly, agonisingly, stripping her self away. She'd even found herself wishing, in her worst moments, that her mother would just die already and free both of them from their misery. But this thought was so awful, so shocking, that she pushed it away every time it bubbled up.

Despite understanding how Neil felt, she began to feel disgusted by his cowardice. She was the one who would definitely have to join up, definitely die; he still had a chance. She couldn't think of anything comforting to say, so she said nothing and backed out of the door. He stared after her with his injured puppy eyes, but at that moment she did not care.

Her thoughts turned to John Connor. What could he possibly want from her?

She passed the field – the hydroponics bays, where the majority of their food came from. Everyone who didn't fight spent a lot of their time there – working in it wasn't mandatory, but there was little else to do.

Some taught the kids how to read and count, someone made moonshine (although no-one was sure who), others drank it. There were a couple of books lying around, and every so often someone would screen a film in the barn, but they only had about twenty videos and these were so well known that almost no-one turned up to watch them any-more.

Card games used to be common, but very few people had full packs any more, so even these were dying out. Erica herself had found an old video camera in the back of an old store room, and a couple of tapes to go in it. When she was younger she and some of the kids used to make up stories and record them, but now Erica just occasionally recorded what she saw – the people in the mart mostly, just going about their every-day lives.

Those who were old enough to remember told stories of before Judgement Day, but no-one really believed them; they'd probably started out as truth but over the years they'd been embellished. Bits of movies or books that didn't exist any more had been thrown in to make it more interesting and because fuck it, why not? The original story tellers had died off, and their stories had been shared around and passed off as someone else's. Lie became truth, became fact became legend.

Three or four people in the camp claimed to have spend all day making sure chickens died properly. One person had made a living by knitting jumpers for dogs. Perhaps the craziest of all: someone else had worked in a bank.

Few of the younger generations were quite sure what banks were: people sat in a building and gave money to other people – some had too much, others too little. It seemed totally crazy. Why not just give everyone the same amount?

* * *

Friday 30th August 1996 – 0.56 am

Markus couldn't sleep. His bed wasn't his own, and he never shared bedrooms if he could help it. He wondered abstractly if he could con the bartender downstairs into giving him a drink; he looked older than he was.

He slipped out from under the covers and immediately stubbed his toe on the trendy armchair nearby.

"Shit! Ow!" Markus muttered loudly under his breath. Felicity stirred.

"Markus?" she murmured softly, clearly still mostly asleep.

"Bathroom." He hoped she would accept it as an excuse.

She sort of grunted in response.

Markus stood still for a minute, waiting for her to fall back to sleep. When he was almost sure she had, he grabbed his clothes from yesterday, and snuck out of the room.

The long bland carpeted corridor was empty, and Markus took the moment to squirm out of his pyjamas as he headed in the direction he thought was the elevator – it was a really big hotel and he wasn't quite sure. He abandoned his pyjamas strewn down the hall – he figured he could get them on the way back. It was a surprise to him when a couple rounded the corner.

Markus still lacked trousers, but they were too wrapped up in each other to notice. He hopped into his jeans as the woman slammed the man into the wall. There was some writhing and kissing, but Markus was past them already.

He reached the elevators before he realized he'd forgotten his shoes. He debated going back, but he figured that was just asking for trouble, so shoeless he descended into the lobby of the hotel.

* * *

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 10.16am

She reached the security checkpoint. She'd never been beyond it before, she'd had never had a reason to. She'd actually never left the civilian areas of the camp before, no-one from the mart had. To be honest, she wasn't even entirely sure how big the camp was. Much bigger than the small areas they were restricted to, that was for sure.

Her mother and most of the adults had vague memories of the outside world, being safe before the war and after, running for their lives, but they'd all lived in the camp in monotony so long that even these were beginning to fade. There was no point in dwelling.

Before Erica's mother, Collette, had gotten sick, after a night of heavy drinking, she would stumble over to the area in the middle of the mart that she and Erica shared. She'd regale long tales of the world before the war, so Erica knew more about it than most.

She'd been a scavenger for the resistance for as long as she was able, and she told stories of this too. They'd gone in to the city nearby and gathered everything that could possibly be useful and brought it back. But it was dangerous, even more so lately, and the parties had stopped going out a few years ago. There was a much bigger machine presence, and almost everything worthwhile was gone already.

Her mother told of the victories, the losses, the horrors she'd faced, the people she'd lost and the very occasional moment of humour, or hope. It was the stories of the good times that turned Erica off being a solider mostly. The moments were so small, so frail, so infrequent. She couldn't live with that. At least in the camp she was safe, she had friends, she had a life beyond the war. Well, not really, but she could pretend.

Even that pretence of a life was slowly slipping away though. Most of her friends had joined up, or wanted to the moment they turned seventeen. Some had died, a few had gone missing. It was the missing ones she worried for the most. If you died, your suffering was over, but if you were captured you would be tortured for information or worse.

There were rumours. The skin for the skin-jobs had to come from somewhere. Another reason she hadn't wanted to join up. Imagine seeing the skin of someone you'd known, someone you'd loved, stretched across a metal skull. Imagine blowing it to pieces, having to clean their blood off your hands, your face... How could you ever talk to their family again? How could you ever see yourself in the same way?

The corridor beyond the checkpoint was like every other in the camp – dingy, badly lit, with pipes pumping water and electricity throughout the complex. Unlike the others however, it wasn't covered in children's drawings – they'd stopped wasting paper for things like that quite a while ago.

There were no windows – the camp was underground. Some of the other camps were above ground, they'd even been told of one that was at the top of a skyscraper in New York, but that one was confirmed destroyed last year. Erica couldn't imagine a skyscraper. She wasn't even sure she could imagine a sky.

The camps that were underground were a little easier to hide, easier to defend, lasted longer. They were also more difficult to escape.

Erica stopped at an intersection. All the corridors stemming from it looked the same, and she had no idea what to look for. Fortunately, a good-looking twenty-something in a uniform was approaching. It was rare to see someone in a uniform these days, most had been lost in one way or another since the beginning of the war. Some of the soldiers liked it though, Erica wasn't sure why.

"I'm looking for Connor, could you-" Before she could finsh her sentence, he replied. Erica hated when people cut her off.

"Yeah, sure" he had a nice smile, and he fell into step with her. They didn't talk, and a minute later, he abandoned her outside a low door. Unsure exactly what to do, Erica knocked tentatively.

"Come in." The call was a little muffled through the door, but she pushed it open, and was caught off guard for a moment. It was a bedroom-cum-office, but that wasn't what was surprising. The room was littered with crumpled papers, blueprints for buildings she'd never seen, charts and lists she didn't understand were pinned haphazardly overlapping on the walls. Strewn in-between were half finished cups of coffee, cigarette butts, the occasional bottle of alcohol, one abandoned sandwich. But that still wasn't what surprised her.

What surprised her was Alison lounging on a small couch in the corner. They didn't seem to be deep in conversation, or having a meeting, discussing tactics. She wasn't even bringing him something, or tidying, or doing anything really. She just seemed to be hanging out, the way Neil would hang around with Erica.

As she came into the room, Alison met her bemused stare with an aggressive one of her own. Alison was a bit of a legend around the mart. She'd infiltrated their ranks by posing as a refugee from a destroyed camp. It was a good cover – it inspired pity, dis-encouraged questions and allowed her to make up her own backstory as she liked.

She'd been adopted quite quickly into the resistance, and had worked her way up the ranks within a few short months. She'd become close with Connor, with some speculation that they'd been having a relationship. She'd only been caught out when Sackhoff – who was suspicious of everyone who became close to Connor – confronted her. In the struggle, he'd managed to cut her top layer of skin, exposing the cold hard metal underneath.

Connor, to everyone's chagrin, instead of killing her did something no-one else had thought of – he cut a hole in her skin, right down to her metal skull, found her chip, pulled it out and plugged it into one of the few working computers they had. He locked himself in his room with the computer and Alison's lifeless body for days on end. He spoke to no-one and ignored the trays of food left outside the room. The light was on constantly inside, leading most people to believe he wasn't sleeping either.

Eventually he had emerged, ragged and exhausted, but with the fruits of his labour – a terminator who, he claimed, would work for us. He gave it the free reign of the base.

This did not go down well. She was attacked almost daily, and he had programmed her to not be capable of harming humans, so she had little option but to take it. Eventually, people began to get used to her stalking the halls, following Connor around and generally putting everyone on edge. But people would never like her, never be civil.

And they would never trust her. But how could they? She was nothing more than a machine.

And she looked particularly mechanical at the moment, analysing Erica calculatingly. Connor saw she was making Erica extremely uncomfortable and said "Alison, could you give us a minute?"

He sized Erica up for a moment then gestured to a seat across the cluttered table that acted as his desk. Alison left the room.

"You're wondering why you're here." It wasn't a question, which was just as well, because Erica was not sure she could talk. She nodded vaguely.

"You have a video camera. I need you to make a video." Connor had this way of sort of announcing things – there was no debate, no other options, no compromises. You did what Connor said.

Erica was not sure what she'd been expecting, but it definitely wasn't that.

"A documentary actually. We are making history. The war is going to end soon, one way or the other. You've watched us die out gradually, and now we're going to do something about it. I want you to record it, I want the future to see how we survived. Or how we ended."

He paused for a moment. "Are you okay?"

Erica was anything but okay. After her entire life being the same, day after day, month after month, year after year, suddenly, in the space of an hour, everything had changed. She didn't know exactly how or what yet, but it was very clear to her that their was something big coming.

An embarrassing lump rose in her throat, and she choked back the tears that threatened to flood down her face. She managed to squeak out a "yeah, fine," and he continued.

"You'll have unlimited access to the most classified meetings, all the plan details, but I also want you to show the training process for the new recruits. I want interviews with the people living in the mart. I want to see people growing things in the feild, and doing whatever else goes on in the mart."

Erica looked him in the eye at that – he sounded like he didn't actually know what happened in the mart. They were separated by, maybe, a hundred metres of corridor, but for Connor they might as well have been on the moon. He had completely lost touch with the people he was trying to lead.

"I want interviews with my military too. I want to see everything that goes on in this camp over the next few days."

Erica began to wonder what Connor's life was like. Did he have friends? Did he get up for breakfast and sit with his men? Was his entire life military plans and tactics, and action reports? Did he measure his days in the amount of human lives lost? She began to suspect, looking around, that he didn't get out of this room much.

"I want to see the look on people's faces right before they go into battle. I don't want propaganda, I don't only want to see people who agree with everything I do, I want you to record the truth. Can you do that Erica?" His piercing eyes bored into her head. She nodded.

"Good. But Erica, this is not going to be safe. You're going to be on the front lines, in the most dangerous places. You are going to be risking your life. You'll be going through training with everyone else, but that will not prepare you. It will not prepare any of you, and I need you to keep your head on straight when you could lose your life at any moment. I need you to be extraordinary."

Erica suddenly wanted to jump up and salute, or hug him, or go shoot some skin-jobs That was Connor's gift, one of the things that made him such a great leader – he inspired people. But, instead she stood up to leave.

"Send Alison back in, would you?"

Alison was standing stock still in the corridor, back to the wall.

"He wants you," Erica told her. Then she wondered if it was true. She was certainly beautiful, and it was impossible to tell how old she was meant to be – anywhere from late teens to late thirties was certainly possible. Alison disappeared into the room and slammed the door.

As Erica walked away she decided it was impossible – Connor knew better than anyone that they were just machines, they couldn't feel anything. Their thoughts weren't thoughts at all, just really clever programming. Weren't they?

Suddenly completely overwhelmed, Erica stopped stock still. She burst spontaneously into tears. Great gulping sobs. She allowed herself ten seconds to completely loose it. Then she wiped her face with her sleeve and glanced at her watch. 10:24. She'd better get going.

* * *

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 12.12pm

This instructor guy was an ass-hole, Erica decided. They'd been divided up into eight groups, by age and physical fitness. She, as a teenager who exercised occasionally, was in one of the better ones, the sevens. Neil was in the group below, who were currently jogging down the corridors of the camp.

Her group and another were squished into a tiny firing range that none of them had known existed before – it was in the military part of the camp. They had a few guns, but no ammo to spare, so the instructor was showing them how to load the guns and shoot them, but all they could really do was point it at the battered target and pretend to shoot.

"At least," the instructor droned, "you'll have some idea of how they work when you join the fight."

Great. That'll be a big help.

Connor had cleared Erica as the only person who was allowed to come and go from training as she wished, so she could be wherever the action was. She excused herself.

As she returned to the mart, she passed the lowest group, the ones. They'd been jogging behind the sixes – Neil's group, but they had stopped to catch their breath. Most were on the edge of starvation, or sick from one of the many diseases that ran rampant through the camp. Some were just too old. Erica didn't really see how they'd be any help at all in the fight.

"Erica!" one of them gasped. "Kill me now, get it over with." It was meant as a joke, but neither of them found it funny. "Maybe later Mr. Sansom."

Back at the mart, Erica stopped by her bed and dug around under it for her camera. She'd been thinking about this during training. She had a tape deck, but there were very few computers around the base. She'd be able to get the video onto the computer, but she had no way to edit it. Her best hope was an in-camera edit, so she'd have to know what exactly to capture, and when.

As she was passing by her mother's bed, her mother moaned. In pain? Maybe? At that particular moment, Erica didn't really care. There was a medic on patrol in the mart at all times, so if anything really bad happened, her mother would be looked after as best they could. Spending time looking after her mother right now felt selfish, in an odd sort of way. She could be doing more to help the human race. So Erica walked straight past.


	3. Chapter 3

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 12.40pm

Erica slipped into the farmhouse. It was a small room, but packed full of the highest ranking military leaders in the base. This was where they planned, and discussed and decided the fate of the human race every single day. No-one from the mart had seen this before; civilians and military were kept completely separate.

Connor stood up on a chair, his head cramped under the low ceiling. Erica found another chair nearby and did like-wise – she needed a good view for the camera. The loud buzz from the gathered people died off as Connor began to speak.

"It's like this folks. Alison found out this morning that the machines are updating their communications." Everyone groaned. Someone shouted from the back "So?" Erica was shocked. Everyone was being really disrespectful. This was John Connor.

But John Connor took it in his stride. He almost smiled.

"So, this is how we win the war."

Silence. No, it was even quieter than that. It seemed as if all the noises of the camp were silent too.

The world stopped, and stared and took a minute to process. It held it's breath as Connor continued; "Okay, you know that telepathic internet thing that the robots have got?" Erica was surprised at this too. Connor always sounded so formal when he spoke to everyone else. Then she realized that the people in this room were the closest things John Connor had to friends.

"The link." Alison added from beside him.

"Yeah, the link," Connor continued. "They're taking it offline to do these updates."

"For how long?" It was the same voice that had questioned Connor a moment ago. Erica whipped the camera around, and was interested to find that it was Sackhoff, Connor's second-in-command. They always seemed so together, so on the same page, whenever anyone saw them, but Erica saw now a hint of friction between them.

"Two minutes." The crowd did not like this at all.

"What good can two minutes possibly do?" Sackhoff again.

Connor found Sackhoff's eyes somewhere down in the back of the room and stared so long that everyone began to feel uncomfortable.

"Two minutes is long enough. We launch an all out assault on Skynet HQ just before it's about to go down. Everything we've got. A huge distraction. A small team, led by me, will infiltrate the base. Their communications being down will give us a fighting chance."

This was true. In recent years, the machines had networked themselves. They could interact mind to mind. If one saw you, all the rest knew immediately where you were. They immediately had a plan, and a back up and a back up to that. Basically, if one saw you, you were screwed.

It was why most of their plans had been failing of late – without that advantage, fighting the machines would be like fighting ordinary humans. Super intelligent, super strong humans, with extremely fast reflexes, some of whom had guns for hands, and outnumbered them probably a thousand to one, but humans none the less. This was starting to sound possible. Kind of.

"We blow their communications hub, once and for all. As far as we can tell, it'll take them months to get it back online. We can pick them off one by one."

"Those of us who survive." Sackhoff was right, it was risky. Very risky. There would be huge casualties

"Yes", said Connor simply, "those of us who survive."

No-one knew how to respond. Erica panned the camera around the faces in the room. Some, like Sackhoff were extremely doubtful. Others were at a complete loss. But a few – enough – had a small glimmer of hope in their eyes.

"When is it happening?" Sackhoff didn't sound quite so aggressive as he had a minute ago.

"Three days."

The room erupted. Arguments broke out around the room. As far as Erica could tell, it was the it-can't-possibly-be-done-ers versus the we-have-to-try-ers. No-one seemed to think it was as big of a slam-dunk as Connor clearly did.

* * *

Friday 30th August 1996 – 1.01 am

The bar was snazzy and thronged with people; the bartender was too busy to even glance Markus' way as he asked "what can I get you?"

This stumped Markus. He had no idea. He'd only ever had beer before, and it had just tasted like bread.

"Scotch, neat." It was what his Mom drank. He didn't notice the man-from-the-puce-volvo barge through the bar and upstairs behind him. The man-from-the-puce-volvo didn't notice him either.

Two drinks later, Markus had found a quiet chair in the corner. He wasn't much for socializing, particularly with strangers, so he sat alone, observing the wildlife before him.

For starters, he wasn't the only one not wearing shoes – several of the more drunk girls had abandoned their impossibly tall heels in various corners of the bar. The crowd seem to be mostly young and wealthy and good-looking. Markus didn't stand out too much, although the hoodie that he'd gotten for volunteering to help build a homeless shelter was not the standard attire.

He watched as slowly the crowd paired off, or left in groups of friends, or some left wistfully alone. Another two scotches after that (he'd hated them at first, but as he drank, it became easier to stomach) he was pretty much alone.

He'd been charging the drinks to the room, and when his parents found this out there would be hell to pay, but at that moment, he was too drunk to care.

Markus had never been drunk before, and he tried to observe the phenomenon scientifically. The room spun, and everything was furry and sort of black. He stumbled slowly towards the lobby, but a couple of chairs and a table jumped rudely into his way. He managed to dodge the chairs for the most part, but the table presented a much bigger problem.

Markus didn't see it until it was too late, and without being quite sure how it had happened he was on the floor, with an arm that was too fuzzy to hurt right now, but would definitely be very sore in the morning.

The bar was empty now, there was no-one to help him up, so Markus sat happily on the floor for a moment, head whirling, stomach churning. He tried very hard not to vomit.

Standing up presented a problem, but using the table and a nearby chair as supports, he somehow managed it. Across the acres of carpeted lobby, he only stumbled twice, but he was very glad to reach the wall. He slumped against it as he waited for an elevator to arrive.

* * *

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 6.40pm

After dinner Erica, feeling guilty at having abandoned her mother earlier, sat with her and talked. Collette didn't say much. Erica wasn't really sure how much she understood any-more

Erica'd spent the afternoon interviewing the various people who'd been at the meeting and getting their take – it'd been about sixty/forty, with more people against than in favour. But every single one of them was willing to try. This plan meant the end of the war, one way or the other. Any outcome, good or bad, was probably better than watching the human race be extinguished one by one, dying out slowly like rats in the sewer.

Neil appeared after a while, as he usually did. He had no family of his own, and Erica and Collette had sort of adopted him. They chatted until eventually Collette nodded off to sleep. The medic had stopped giving her meds, said there was no point any-more; they needed to be saved for the people who actually had a chance. So Collette's dreams were fraught with pain. She tossed and turned frantically.

"I talked to the medic. He cleared me." Neil didn't betray any of his emotions. But Erica had known him long enough to know that for Neil, this was not a good thing. They sat in silence.

"There's a meeting tonight, you should come." Neil had been trying to get her to go to these meetings for weeks.

It had started as a group of twenty or so, who questioned the decisions Connor had been making. But it had grown. A lot. Erica had always refused to go on principle, but with her new status as documentarian, her curiosity got the better of her. Connor had told her to get all sides of the story. So she wilted and she agreed.

* * *

Friday 30th August 1996 – 4.47 am

Markus had been wandering the corridors for a good twenty minutes. They all looked the same, and he was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to find the elevators again if he tried, but the room numbers around here looked promisingly close to his own.

He rounded the corner. There were clothes strewn across the floor - what kind of idiot would leave pyjamas... Oh, yeah, right.

The doors to what he was pretty sure was his parents room, and the one he and his sister shared were wide open. Huh. Weird.

At the other end of the corridor was a girl. She was about eleven or twelve, Felicity's age, but he was pretty sure it wasn't Felicity. As he approached his room, she motioned furiously at him, but in his drunken state, the motions were incomprehensible, and he just wanted to get to bed. She realized she wasn't getting through to him, and raced towards him, just as he was getting to the door of his room.

It was dark inside, but Markus could have sworn he saw two red lights staring out at him, before the girl tackled him away. There were noises inside, someone getting up and coming after him. He started to shout out to them "hey gu-", but the girl clamped her hand over his jaw.

Somehow, Markus' brain slowly kicked into gear and he began to realize he was in danger. The girl had dragged him off the ground and a few feet down the hall before the man-from-the-puce-volvo appeared out of the room door.

Glancing back, Markus saw that he had a really big gun, and that was all the motivation he needed to run full pelt – or what passed as full pelt in his current state – down the hall, rounding the corner before the man could get a shot off.

The man didn't seem to be in much of a rush, and Markus and the girl managed to stay a corner ahead of him as she navigated the maze and found the way downstairs. There was a staircase to their left, and the elevators beyond that.

Markus pushed open the stairway door, but she shook her head, grabbed him firmly by the front of the shirt and pulled him heavily into the elevator, pushing the button to close the doors. She didn't, however, press a button for a floor.

Markus collapsed unhappily to the floor, and began to sob loudly, but she shut him up with one look. Outside they heard the man thunder down the stairs. Once the noise had subsided, the girl began to talk.

"Listen." She pointed at herself. "Patton. Sarah sent me." Markus had no idea who Sarah was. The running had sobered him up a little and he began to realize how much danger he was in. And how much his arm hurt.

A few minutes passed, and the elevator began to move.

"Shit!" Patton whispered under her breath. It was an understatement. "Get up. Do not run unless he is there."

Markus clambered to his feet. The doors opened on the second floor and a couple of old ladies with sleep in their eyes tottered in, dragging massive suitcases. One of them smiled kindly. "Bit late for you two to be wandering around isn't it?"

Markus ignored her, and when the floor moved out from under him again he stumbled. The old lady realized the state he was in, saw his lack of shoes, and her kindness turned very suddenly disapproving. She exchanged a look with her companion, pursed her lips and turned away to stare pointedly at the now opening door.

"Act sober," Patton ordered under her breath. She put her arm around him and they emerged into the lobby. There were a couple of people there now, and Markus examined their faces as they passed. Were they in league with that guy? Any one of them, at any moment, could turn and pull out a gun and shoot him in the head.

They managed to make it out the front door. The ground was wet from a recent fall of rain. There was a puce volvo parked across the street. It was at that moment that Markus realized he still didn't have any shoes. They power-walked for a couple of blocks – or at least, Patton power-walked and Markus stumbled along behind as quickly as he could.


	4. Chapter 4

Friday 30th August 1996 – 6.03 am

Patton's key turned in the lock. The many flights of stairs had been a challenge for Markus, but he had managed. Patton crossed to the window and peeked through the slats of the closed blind. Then she walked around the room examining various objects.

Markus began to speak, but she silenced him by putting her finger to her lips. Eventually, everything seemed satisfactory – nothing had moved.

"We lost him back at the hotel, I think." As she spoke she crossed back to the window and pulled open the blind. Light flooded into the room, and Markus got his first proper look around.

It was a dingy studio. There was a mattress on the floor, a couple of cabinets in the corner, the couch Markus had slumped down on and not much else.

There was also a door; Markus leapt to his feet, crossed the room and dove head-first into what he hoped was the toilet. What followed – a few minutes of retching, interspersed with brief moments of rest – left him empty and hollow. He almost fell asleep on the floor right there, his head resting peacefully on the porcelain, but Patton helped him impatiently to the mattress.

He passed out.

* * *

Saturday 13th October 2029 – 8.30pm

Everyone had arrived a few minutes before, and they were chattering loudly. These meetings had taken place mostly in one of the classrooms, but the last few had grown so big, they'd moved to the barn. The room was a little less than half full. Half the people in the camp. Erica shook off the thought. She stood in her usual spot, at the front of the balcony, but now she was alone up there, looking in.

One of the older men, a civilian, took to the stage. Erica recognised him. He had taught her to read. He started to give some speech about how Connor was failing them as a leader, and needed to be replaced. Erica sort of zoned out, and became much more interested in how the crowd responded to what he was saying. In the beginning, a couple of people nodded in agreement to everything he said, but as the speech progressed and the man got more impassioned, so did the crowd. His final words were met with a rousing cheer.

He wasn't quite finished when something distracted him. He died off, and clambered off the stage. Someone else climbed on.

Sackhoff.

The crowd, already worked up, went wild, but Sackhoff shushed them. One or two people slipped out of the room.

"I am here because I cannot condone the actions of John Connor any longer."

There was silence. This, coming from Connor's most trusted lieutenant was almost blasphemy.

"He was once a great leader, but he has become corrupted by the words of that metal BITCH -" he was cut off by the fervent roars of the assembled crowd.

"That metal bitch who whispers in his ear and convinces him to do exactly what the machines want. He spends all of his time locked up in his room with her, and only comes out to issue his decrees from on high!"

This was news to the people of the mart and the crowd frothed at the mouth. The din was deafening. The decibel meter on the mic from the camera maxed out, and Erica wished she had better equipment. The people who had left returned, with more and more people from the mart.

"This latest plan of his is suicide. It will mean the end of the human race. We will not walk blindly to the slaughterhouse!" The crowd was still growing. Erica could see that not everyone agreed with what Sackhoff was saying, but everyone wanted to hear it. Those that did agree shouted loud enough for everyone else.

"I will not tell you the details, because we cannot trust everyone in this room, but believe me when I say, this plan will be the death of us all." The crowd hushed suddenly.

John Connor had entered the room.

Alison, as usual, stood beside him. Sackhoff saw him and faced him unashamedly at the head of his masses, but many others in the crowd started to slip away. Even more hid their faces and looked at the ground. No-one wanted to be seen standing against Connor.

Sackhoff hopped off the table and approached Connor. He looked from Connor to Alison and back again. And then he walked away. The crowd dispersed.

The room was empty now, apart from Alison and Connor, and Erica, unseen, up on the balcony. She zoomed close on Connor's face, and, just for a moment, she saw it crack. The facade slipped and he looked utterly helpless.

Then they were gone, and Erica was left alone to try and figure it all out.

* * *

Friday 30th August 1996 – 4:20 pm

Markus awoke to the smell of food. Patton shoved Pot Noodle in his face, handed him a fork and sat on the couch to eat her own.

Now that the alcohol had worn off, Markus felt like shit. His head pounded, he was seriously nauseous and his left arm hurt. Badly.

"Why's he after you?" Patton asked.

"I don't know. I thought you did."

She shrugged. "Sarah told me to get you to Panama and keep you away from the bad guys."

"Panama? What the fuck is in Panama? Who are the bad guys? What the hell is going on?" Markus, all of a sudden, was seriously pissed. It didn't look like he was going to college any time soon. Felicity had always said he'd drop out, but neither of them had expected it to be before he'd even gotten there.

Felicity... Felicity. His parents.

He slowly put down the Pot Noodle, concentrating very hard on not spilling it. Then he didn't know what to do with his hands. He held the injured one up in front of his face and looked at it, without seeing it at all.

He stood up, almost completely unaware of what he was doing and began to pace furiously. He had a vice-like grip on the ring finger of his left hand and he shook it fiercely until all the other fingers flapped around uncontrollably. The pain helped him focus."The news. I need to see the news."

Felicity – no, Patton switched on a small television with a cracked screen that Markus hadn't noticed before, and they watched. It was the local news channel, and Markus paced his way through the weather, a story about a water-skiing canary and the presidential candidates' visit to a school in the Bronx. Markus was almost beginning to relax – surely it would have been on by now. Then -

"And back to our main story of the morning; there has been attack on a hotel in Manhattan in the early hours of the morning. The Sackhoff family from Charlotte, North Carolina were brutally murdered in their hotel rooms. They are believed to be the main target of the attack."

"Three other guests and a security guard were also killed, but out of respect for the families we are not currently releasing their names. The main suspect is shown here in CCTV footage entering the hotel..." They displayed a grainy image of the man-from-the-puce-volvo. It was the first time Markus had gotten a good look at him.

"... was seen leaving the hotel a few hours later. Still missing is eighteen year old Markus Sackhoff. It is still unclear whether he was involved in the shooting and both suspects are to be treated as extremely dangerous. Anyone seeing them should immediately call 911." They were now showing an old photo of Markus – it looked like the one his Dad carried in his wallet.

Markus started out calm, but was getting more and more desperate as the reporter spoke, until suddenly the words were too much. There was a ringing in his ears and he stared unseeingly at an oddly shaped knot in the wooden floor.

Patton paid him no attention and kept eating. The television prattled on, but only one more sentence caught Markus' attention; "more updates on this tragic story to come." He absent-mindedly wondered what they would be.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 8.14am

Erica wandered the halls of the military part of the camp. Having this new area to explore unhindered was weird to say the least, but she was fascinated. It seemed to go on forever. A door was open, just a crack, up ahead, and she heard raised voices. She poked the camera inside, enough to remain unseen. She figured if it was nothing interesting she could always tape over it.

She couldn't make out faces, but she thought one sounded like Sackhoff. Then someone crossed in front of the door and she saw the face of the young solider who'd shown her to Connor's room yesterday, but it looked different now. It was twisted, angry. He wasn't wearing his uniform any-more.

He was saying "they saw us straight away. They had to have known we were coming. My brother -" His voice gave out and he stopped, gathered himself then continued - "my brother went down first. I turned, ran. I abandoned them. If I hadn't - maybe..."

The one who sounded like Sackhoff stopped him. "You couldn't have helped them." He sounded kind. "If you'd have stayed, you'd be dead too, like the rest of them."

"That's the thing," the solider continued, "I don't think they killed all of them. Anderson definitely looked at me as I ran. What if they captured him? He knows everything."

Everyone paused, then Sackhoff (Erica had decided it was definitely Sackhoff) said, "Okay, thank you for coming to me with this." Erica realized he was about to dismiss them and disappeared down the hall just as he said "I'll deal with it."

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 8.31am

Erica got back to the mart just as the lights were flickering on. Dazed adults shuffled out of bed, while most of the teenagers rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Kids raced around, screaming at the top of their lungs and generally made getting up a lot quicker, and a lot more tense. Erica had eyes for none of this however.

Collette was sitting up in bed. This was huge. Colossal. Monumental. Even from across the room, Erica could tell that she hadn't been this well in weeks. Erica hardly even noticed crossing the room – she was just suddenly right by her mother's side.

Wordlessly, Collette reached up and touched Erica's cheek. It was then that Erica realized it was wet – she was crying. Everything that had happened the last day, the good, the bad, hit Erica. Seeing her mother like this, looking so well, Erica became a child again.

More than anything, Erica realized that the reason she'd been avoiding her mother was that she just couldn't bear to see her like that, couldn't bear to loose her.

"Mom..." Erica couldn't get out more than that. Collette reached up and gently pulled her daughter into bed with her. She put her arm around her and they lay like that for a few minutes, completely serene in the middle of a chaotic whirl around them.

It was easier to talk like this, without having to look her mother in the eye. "I'm sorry for not being here." Erica tested her out – she didn't want to upset her.

Collette started stroking her head.

"I miss you mom."

And that was it. That was all Erica got. She turned to look at her mother, but she knew what she would see before she saw it.

Collette had disappeared again. There was none of her spark left in her eyes.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 8.52am

Erica rounded the corner outside Connor's room. Alison was standing guard outside.

"I need to talk to him."

"Which him? There are many males." A typical machine response.

"Connor."

"He's busy."

"It's really important."

"He's talking to Sackhoff. You can see him after."

Sackhoff? That was alright then.

"You know what, never-mind" Erica turned to go, but Alison stopped her. "Do you want to interview me?"

This was unexpected. "Oh, um, why do you ask?"

"John said you might want to interview me." John. Erica had never really heard anyone call him John before. Then again, they didn't exactly swim in the same social circles.

But this was interesting. Could you even interview a machine really? Sure they could give you answers, but could those answers really mean anything?

"Yeah, definitely. Let's do it."


	5. Chapter 5

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 8.57am

They'd set up in a little room next to the farmhouse, where Connor had given out his plan yesterday. Had that really only been yesterday? It seemed so long ago.

Erica didn't have a tripod, so she'd propped the camera up on a table with some books to angle it.

"Alison."

"Yes."

Erica had no idea what to ask.

"The link. Are you connected to it?"

"No."

"Why?"

"It's not safe. If I connected to it, they would know everything that I know."

"But you still can connect to it? Whenever you want?"

"Yes."

A seed of doubt started to germinate in Erica's mind. Connor was putting a lot of trust in one of them.

"What do you think of Connor's plan?"

It was a pretty standard question, she'd opened quite a few of her interviews with it.

"It has good chances of success. I helped him devise it."

"But a lot of people will die?"

"Babies are born. People can be replaced."

Wow.

"Do you think that it was a good idea for you to help him with it? Do you think other humans would accept the plan if they knew of your involvement? Did you feel conflicted, helping possibly to bring about the downfall of your race?"

"Yes. I don't know. I don't understand your question."

Erica had expected a flat out no on the last one, and Alison's evasive answer intrigued her.

"So are you an Asimo kind of robot, or a Blade Runner type one?" Blade Runner was one of the very few movies to survive Judgement Day. Everyone hated it, but it was played a lot more often than the rest.

Then something entirely unexpected happened. Alison began to laugh. It was a little too loud, went on a little too long. And it stopped as suddenly as it had started. And it creeped Erica the hell out.

"Why are you laughing Alison?"

"You made a joke."

Erica hadn't really made a joke at all, but she went with it.

"Did you find it funny?"

"I don't know."

Again, Erica was surprised that Alison hadn't simply said no. She doubted that the machines had added a sense of humour to their programming.

"Who taught you to laugh Alison?"

"Nobody."

Erica struggled not to freak out as she said "Okay Alison, I think I have what I needed."

* * *

Friday 30th August 1996 – 4:49 pm

Patton stood up and looked out the window. "We have to leave."

Markus didn't even look at her.

"Now Markus."

He jerked back to attention "What's happening?"

"There's a car outside. Puce volvo. I saw it at the hotel too."

Markus held it together. He nodded. They left everything behind as they scurried out the door.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 10.47am

Training this morning was decidedly fun, but Erica was completely distracted. They'd taken over another part of the camp that Erica hadn't known existed. She wondered, not for the first time, how big the camp really was.

It was basically capture the flag, odds against evens. Each team was led by a highly qualified solider – one of Connor's top guys. Erica's was lead by a young, energetic and oddly optimistic Joan. Joan seemed pretty much oblivious to the fact that the world had always been a bit shit and had entirely gone to shit as of late.

The evens were, as Erica saw it, playing the machines – defending the base, a disused storeroom. The odds objective was to get inside and steal a box. It was metallic and heavy and labelled "the box".

The sevens were the ones tasked with actually breaking in and getting it. The ones were pretty much useless, and Joan had them scattered around acting as distractions and cannon fodder. The threes were on re-con, reporting back the position and amount of the enemy troops. The fives were the muscle, fighting their way in and supporting the seven's main assault.

They still didn't have any actual bullets, and all the guns were needed anyway, so killing someone consisted of pointing your finger at them and shouting "bang".

This was how it worked in theory. In practice, everyone ran around shouting "bang" or pretending to die. Every couple of feet there was a few people standing around arguing over who shot who first.

Erica pretty much side-stepped everyone, and made her way into the enemy base without much resistance. Inside, everyone was contentedly lying on the floor, apart from Neil.

She grinned and pointed her fingers threateningly at him. "Now I don't want to kill you Neil, but for some reason, I desperately need this probably empty box." Neil shrugged, clearly not caring what she did, so Erica walked over to the box and tried to pick it up. It was really heavy.

"I can't lift it. Give us a hand?" Neil laughed. Helping an enemy solider to win was a bit far, even for him.

"Truce?" he asked.

"Sure. We suck at this." They both collapsed laughing against the wall, waiting for the game to be over. A nearby corpse started to giggle too – a girl they had grown up with.

Erica's laugh died off suddenly as she remembered Alison's, but Neil's ended as abruptly as hers had.

"What?" Erica asked, concerned.

"Nothing," Neil replied soberly.

"No, really, what?"

"It's just, we can't keep you from getting a box out of a storeroom, you can't get a box out of a storeroom..." he trailed off.

"Yeah, pathetic, aren't we?" Erica began to laugh again, but Neil cut her off.

"No, you don't get it," he said. "If we can't even win a stupid game, how the hell are any of us supposed to survive whatever crazy-ass plan Connor's got cooked up?"

* * *

Friday 30th August 1996 – 9.38 pm

The truck stop diner was twenty-four hours. Patton hadn't drunk any of her coffee; Felicity had hated coffee. It occurred to Markus that he'd thought of Felicity in the past tense, but there was no time to dwell – Patton had slipped out of their booth and was approaching a kind-looking trucker.

"We need a lift," she started, gesturing at Markus, but the trucker flat out ignored her.

"Just as far as-" Still no response. Patton gave up and started heading back to their booth.

A burly guy spoke up - "you kids need a lift? I'm heading south. Charlotte, North Carolina."

Markus sized him up – long beard, seriously questionable tattoos. This guy probably wouldn't turn them in to the police.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 1.01pm

The farmhouse was busy, as per usual. Someone had brought in a tray heaped with plates of food – with the "Final Battle", as everyone was calling it now, going down in one day, eighteen hours and eleven minutes according to the countdown clock on the wall, nobody had time to stop for lunch.

Groups of people stood around the room. Some were arguing over minute details of the plan, others were co-ordinating squads from other camps over the radio. More still were gathered around a big white board intently watching a short bespectacled someone draw an intricate diagram. One would comment every once in a while, and everyone else would nod enthusiastically or shake their heads emphatically.

Connor was going from group to group, checking in on everyone, co-ordinating plans and occasionally over-ruling someone. The people from the whiteboard looked up as he passed. The guy who was drawing called after him; "We could really use Alison here."

"She's around somewhere, she'll be here in a minute," Connor called back.

Erica followed him silently – she figured he'd be the one who would know all aspects of the plan. He got to the people with the radios and listened while one of them finished talking to the person on the other end.

"So you've got a hundred and twenty two on the way?"

There was a crackle of confirmation on the other end.

"Great."

There was a bit more crackling and a fuzzy voice on the other end. Erica thought she'd made out a 10am in there somewhere.

As far as Erica knew, before Judgement Day there'd been a whole big long set of rules to talking on the radio. After Judgement Day, all rules went out the window, in pretty much every aspect of human life. At the moment, the rules boiled down to "try not to hurt anyone if you don't have to" and "do what Connor says". That was about it.

The woman turned to Connor and said "Three are sending a hundred and twenty two at five, thirty four are sending nineteen, not sure when, ninety six don't have anyone spare, forty seven and twenty one are sending two hundred and eighty four together, but they won't be here until eight tomorrow night. And we can't get in touch with thirty eight. Thirty four sent someone over there yesterday, we'll hear in about an hour, but it's not looking good."

This was a whole pile of very confusing information to heap on anyone's head at once, but Connor nodded as if he understood completely. As far as Erica could figure it, some of the numbers were other camps, some were the amount of people they were sending to help, and some were when they'd get here.

"That's only seven camps!" she blurted out. Everyone ignored her. Seven! There were thirteen weren't there? And more that were still around but out of contact? Surely Connor would contact them now.

She grabbed his arm, pulled him around and demanded "Seven camps? That's it, isn't it?" all the while wondering how she dared – this was John Connor.

He nodded sheepishly.

"But there are people in Europe aren't there? And they were holding out in Nigeria too right?"

He shook his head. "They went out of contact in France last year, Belgium a few months after, and Nigeria last week. Us Americans, we're all that's left."

Erica tried to remember back to what the radio woman had said – three, thirty four, ninety six, forty seven, twenty one, and thirty eight. She did some quick mental maths. Including them, that was a little over three thousand people – a third of what she'd thought it had been this morning.

Three thousand people were what was left of the human race, and that was only if the people in thirty eight were okay.

Shivers went down Erica's spine and her mind whirled, but she kept her camera fixed on the back of Connor's head as he went to the next group, the ones who were trying to figure out the details of the plan.

"Okay folks, we're getting reinforcements. Four hundred and twenty five of them. We've got one and a half times that here." The assembled heads nodded and went back to planning. Connor stood for a minute and stared around the room. Erica couldn't read his face.

Sackhoff came over and the two were deep in hushed conversation when there was a scream from down the hall. Everyone froze. There was a bang, then a gunshot, then nothing. The whiteboard guy, who was nearest the door, stood up to open it. He poked his head out to look. There was another gunshot and he keeled backwards, eyes glassy, an expression of mild surprise on his face, a growing red spot on his forehead.

There were footsteps coming down the hall. No-one really knew what to do. They were all military, but there were very few fighters in the room. And they had no guns. Sackhoff was the first one to move. He hid behind the still open door.

Erica was out of her mind with fear, but she almost laughed when it occurred to her that the fate all of their lives, and by extension, the whole human race, were hinging on the same tactics that she'd used when playing hide and seek at age five. If everyone in this room died, everyone else was screwed too.

She saw Connor nod at Sackhoff as the footsteps approached the door. Alison rounded it, gun pointing straight at Connor's chest.

Erica had known Alison was a machine, but this was the first time she really understood what that meant. She pulled the camera into an extreme close-up of Alison's face. Her eyes were so cold. There was no glint of recognition.

Connor - this was the person that Alison spent all of her time following around, the person she was completely loyal to. There was no hesitation as she pulled the trigger.

Erica whipped the camera around Connor's face as the gun went off, so she missed what happened next, but the details of that weren't what was important to her. What was important was what was going on in Connor's eyes.

Shock, betrayal, horror. Those words didn't cover it. There was... love? Was that the right word? There was love in his eyes. And disappointment. The kind of disappointment that parents have when their teenager steals their wallet and runs away to Vegas with a drug dealer. But it was so much stronger than that. John was devastated.

Erica felt uncomfortable keeping the camera on him – she didn't want to betray his feelings to anyone. At least until she understood them herself. So she turned the camera back to the action. She quickly gathered that Sackhoff had tackled Alison just as the gun went off. The bullet had harmlessly shot off into the ceiling, knocking off a small shower of dust. Someone had pulled the gun out of Alison's hands, and four or five people were sitting on her arms and legs, holding her down.

She was struggling, but no noise came out of her mouth. Her face was still so calm. There was nothing there. Someone handed Sackhoff a pen-knife and for a few minutes everyone stared in silence as Sackhoff cut into Alison's skull and she tried, emotionlessly, to throw him off. She suddenly went limp as Sackhoff triumphantly pulled a small micro-chip out of her head and held it up.

"Yeah, good."

Connor's voice surprised everyone. He sounded very far away, his eyes still fixed unseeingly on Alison's face. Then he came back into the room, and looked around. He cleared his throat.

"Good Markus, thank you. I'll take that."

He held out his hand, and Sackhoff placed the chip questioningly into it. Connor's hand closed slowly around it.

"Thank you."

Connor left the room without another word, stepping over Alison's body, leaving the rest of them staring after him. Slowly everyone went back to what they'd been doing before – a couple of people lifted whiteboard guy's limp body away.

A small pool of blood formed around Alison's lifeless eyes.

They just left her there, half in, half out of the room.


	6. Chapter 6

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 1.11pm

Erica hadn't been able to breathe in that room, and left a minute after Connor. She wondered how many of them had seen what she had – how much Connor cared about... Something distracted her.

She was in the corridor on the edge of military space. Standing at the checkpoint, arguing furiously with the security guy, was Neil.

"Okay, you can't let me in. Can you go get her? She needs -" he cut off the end of his sentence as he saw Erica approach. There was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She knew exactly what he was going to say; "Your mother." She also knew exactly what he didn't say. Her mother was dead.

She nodded. It had been inevitable. She'd even wanted it, in a sick sort of way. It was probably better.

So it was with a remarkably cool head that she entered the mart a minute later. Most of the population of the camp lined the walk between the door and Collette's bed. Nobody said anything – they all knew loss well enough to know that there were no words that could possibly help.

Arms reached out as she passed. Some grabbed her hands, others stroked her arms, most just patted her gently. They were letting her know that they were there, they shared her grief.

Collette lay spread-eagled, eyes wide open. Erica'd heard so often people say that dead people looked just like they were asleep. Collette dream's had been so violent of late, that now she looked anything but. Her corpse reminded Erica, more than anything, of Alison's, probably still abandoned on the floor of the farmhouse.

There was no-one else. Collette had been her family. Neil was good, he was a friend, but Erica was alone now, and she was keenly aware of it.

* * *

Saturday 31st August 1996 – 0.25am

It was late. Markus was still a bit hungover, and his arm hurt like hell. He was beginning to think it needed to be looked at.

He was still too wired to sleep. Patton, on the other hand, seemed to be perfectly fine. He would have expected someone of her age to be asleep or over-tired or whining by now. Something. But she just kept her eyes on the road ahead, and kept checking the mirrors to see what was behind.

The driver chatted away, mostly to himself, because neither Markus or Patton were listening. Markus suspected that the driver had been alone for a long time.

The truck was one of the huge international ones, but the cab was tiny. There were only two seats, including the driver's, so Patton was relegated to a sort of bunk that ran across behind them. The roof sloped above her head, and she either had to crouch or turn her head to the side if she wanted to sit up straight, but it didn't seem to bother her too much.

Markus was nodding off when she poked him hard in the ribs. He jolted awake and she communicated silently with her eyes. Clearly she didn't want the driver to know.

She widened them alarmingly, then glanced pointedly towards the mirror, then back at Markus, then back to the mirror. He stared behind them, searching for what she'd seen. There was nothing, and he micro-shrugged at her.

Patton's eyes were frantically telling him to have another look. This time he saw. A puce volvo. Shit. They were being followed.

For the next few hours, it was all that Markus could do not to watch the car. Reflecting on it, it was really very considerate of whoever was after him to drive a car so noticeably ugly.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 1.47pm

Erica had sat alone in the mart for the last half hour, while the people around her slowly got on with their business of being alive.

At half past one, the loosely termed lunch break was over and people began to leave. Children went to their classrooms. Erica wondered what the point was. The few who were too sick or old to fight went to the field Erica wondered how many of them would live to eat the food that was grown. And the rest went to training.

Training was the only thing that made sense to Erica now. She wanted to get up and join them. She wanted to learn how to fight. She wanted to kill something. But her mother had just died, so she sat, alone, by her bedside.

To be honest, Erica was bored. This thing next to her wasn't her mother. She wasn't the woman who'd kissed her on the head, or made her laugh at her nightmares. She wasn't the woman Erica had looked after for the last few months. Erica's mother just wasn't. Not any-more

Erica leapt up. She couldn't sit here any-more She ran out of the room and into the corridor. She gasped for breath, but not from the run. She wandered the halls for a while, thinking about nothing. She found herself near the training rooms and slipped inside.

She realized that she hadn't put down her camera from earlier, just switched it off. The world was further away and easier to deal with through a camera lens, so she switched it back on.

The ass-hole instructor – who's name she'd completely forgotten and didn't care about anyway – was demonstrating military hand signals. She turned her camera on his audience. It looked like the ones, twos, threes and fours.

Some were mimicking passionately, latching on to any small bit of information that could possibly keep them alive. Others listened half-heartedly, but there was a good portion of the group who were whispering and laughing down the back. Few people cared any more – about anything.

The people who were talking noticed the camera, straightened up and started pretending to pay attention. This hadn't been Erica's intention at all, and she wanted to shout out "but no! I'm one of you!"

She didn't, and moved on instead. But it had made her realize, for the first time, that the act of filming something changed what was happening. She didn't know what to do with that information, so she stored it away in the back of her mind somewhere for later.

Joan had the rest of the new recruits off in another room. She was standing to the side while a medic droned on about battlefield first aid. If it was possible, the five, sixes, sevens and eights were paying less attention than the ones, twos, threes and fours had.

Joan spotted the camera, and it seemed to inspire her to action. She pushed aside the medic and said; "You're on the battlefield."

Everyone looked confused.

"There are people screaming and dying all around. There's so much going on that you can't see or hear straight. You've lost contact with your squad leader and everyone else is gone." Her audience was captivated.

"You're almost out of ammo. This big-ass terminator comes up out of nowhere, and blows the guy next to you away."

Pause.

"You kill it right back, but then you turn around and the guy next to you isn't dead. Blood is pumping out of a gaping hole in his chest." Erica saw where this was going and smiled to herself.

"Do you want to be the hero who knows how and where to put the pressure to save that guy's life, or do you want to be the idiot who stands by, hands hanging, while he bleeds out at your feet?"

Joan stepped back and nodded at the medic, who continued, with a much more attentive audience and a grateful smile on his face.

* * *

Saturday 31st August 1996 – 7.43am

The truck slowing down woke Markus. He looked around. Patton was stretched out behind them, but as the truck stopped, she started awake.

"Where are we?" Markus asked the driver.

"Outside Charlotte. I'm heading through to the other side, need to top up the gas."

"We'll get out here," Patton decided for the both of them. She'd seen something else, Markus knew, but he wasn't sure what. He realized all of a sudden that they'd both been sleeping and had lost track of the volvo. Shit.

It didn't pull in straight after them, however. And then Markus saw what Patton had. There was a city bus idling outside the gas station. The doors closed, and it was about ready to pull away, but the driver spotted them coming and let them on.

"Nearly left without you there."

"Yeah, thanks. You're a lifesaver."

Markus wished he could tell the driver that this was literally true. He fished around the bottom of his pocket for some change and between the two of them, they just about cobbled together enough for the fare.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 5.24pm

Most of them were still eating dinner in the corner of the mart reserved for such things when the call came down.

There wasn't much furniture over here. A couple of tables, a few more chairs. These were reserved for those who really needed them – the old, the sick. So, Erica and Neil were sitting on the floor with a group of their friends. They were laughing and joking like it was any other day. Actually, they were laughing and joking even more than that. They were trying to distract Erica from what was coming.

When a small child ran in and pulled on Mr. Sansom's shirt, nobody even noticed. He whispered in Mr. Sansom's ear and ran off to spread the word further. Mr. Sansom stood up. He was one of the oldest on the base, but still lively and more fit than many thirty years younger. His age commanded respect, but his personality and manner commanded even more, so everyone stopped to listen as he began to speak. He didn't say much.

"They're here."

Erica had never heard more exciting words in her life. Like everyone else, she jumped up and followed him out of the room. Unlike everyone else, she stopped at her bed to get her camera. This was not going to be something to be missed. The crowd was moving slowly, like all crowds do, and Erica danced impatiently.

Word had been spreading of the troops' arrival all day. There had never been this many new people arriving at once before. There were very few people in the civilian part of the camp that Erica hadn't known since birth. And these new people were angels, here to save them.

At least, that was the generally accepted story. Erica herself didn't have quite that much faith. She'd seen too much about people over the last few days to put her faith in anyone so absolutely. Still, their arrival was hope. For everyone.

It took quite a while for the entire camp, nearly a thousand of them, to climb the many levels of narrow winding stairs. Erica hadn't known they were this far below ground. None of them had been to this part of the camp before.

They found themselves in a vast, poorly lit room. Everyone was quiet, waiting. A moment later there was a chink of light and a thunderous grinding noise. Both grew and grew, until it seemed like the wall in front of them was peeling back and coming apart.

They couldn't see much outside, the light was blinding, but Erica was almost sure she caught a distant glimpse of blue before the doors began to close again.

Someone had found the light switch inside, and as the doors shut, the lights flickered on. Across the room, with a wide gap between them, stood a group of people.

Erica didn't know what she'd been expecting, but it wasn't this. Everyone seemed to be thinking the same, and there was a moment while they all reassessed The group looked smaller than she'd thought they'd be. The number one hundred and twenty two sprung into mind. She thought she'd heard it earlier. But there were fewer than that.

Two or three were being supported by others, and one other collapsed. A giant on the end put down what seemed to be a body. And then it occurred to her. They had come to join the fight, but they'd had to get here first.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 5.42pm

After the disappointment that was supposed to have been their salvation, everyone was in the mood for a good funeral.

Erica was changing beside her bed in the mart. Some of the older ones clung to the idea of privacy and went to the bathroom stalls to change their clothes, but Erica and the younger ones had never known any different. They'd all seen each other naked enough times for it to not matter any-more anyway. Very few things mattered any-more

She put on her best (and only) dress. Well, it wasn't even really her dress, it was one of the ones that had been passed around the mart so often that nobody was entirely sure who it had belonged to originally. Erica absent-mindedly wondered if they were dead. It was a nice dress though, and was usually reserved for weddings and funerals.

Neil came up. He didn't say anything, but he flopped down on her mother's half-made bed and stared at the distant concrete ceiling. He'd lost someone close to him too, but at that moment, Erica did not give a single fuck. And she was pissed. That was her mother's bed.

She slapped him across the face.

He was completely stunned for a moment, then reached out with his leg and kicked her, hard. And then he started to laugh. Erica thought he'd gone nuts. Well, more nuts. And then she joined in.

He sat up, and she plonked down beside him. He put his arm around her and through the giggles, he managed to get out "I only wanted to borrow some toothpaste."

Erica had been starting to regain her composure, but at this she completely lost it. "Didn't you hear?"

He shook his head.

"We're out."

He didn't get it for a moment, but then it clicked. We wasn't just Erica. It wasn't just the people nearby, or just the people in the mart. It wasn't even just the people in this camp. We was the entire human race.

The entire human race was out of toothpaste.

As far as Erica and Neil were concerned this was the funniest thing that had ever happened.

"Oh god," Neil gasped, "maybe it really is the end."


	7. Chapter 7

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 6.03pm

The barn wasn't as full as Erica had expected. She hadn't expected the new arrivals to come, but she had every opportunity to scan the faces of the crowd, and there were a few that were missing. It didn't bother her too much though.

She was standing next to Mr. Sansom on the makeshift stage. He was droning on. Collette's body lay at his feet.

No-one was really religious any-more. Most people believed in some sort of God, but the idea was vague and distant, and no-one really knew the rules of any religions, so funerals were a weird combination of things; military protocol, prayer, little rituals that had sprung up over the years. Whoever was leading the funeral – Mr. Sansom in this case – would regale the story of the dead person's life.

Not that Collette had had a boring life, but Mr. Sansom hadn't known her that well, so he didn't know the best bits, when Collette was a hero to her daughter. Like the time she'd brought a Twinkie and some Starburst home from a scavenging trip. The Twinkie was disgusting, but the Starburst were amazing. Erica'd had one. Her mother had told her to share the rest, but she'd eaten them all herself. Neil still complained about it at every opportunity.

She saw Neil now. He was standing a little way off with the camera, recording everything. He saw her looking, opened his mouth wide and ran his tongue over his teeth as though trying to see how dirty they were. Erica, who hadn't quite gotten over the giggling fit, barely hid her amusement. It was just like Neil to try and make her laugh in the middle of her mother's funeral.

Mr. Sansom had gotten to the really sad bit, when Collette had gotten ill. It had been hard. So hard. In Erica's eyes, Collette had gone from being this invincible bad-ass, to a meek helpless invalid unable to pull herself out of bed.

The doctor had put her on a whole cocktail of medicine. Collette, at one point, had joked that she'd become a drug addict. Erica didn't really know what that was, but she'd laughed anyway. It sounded bad.

Thinking back on it though, Erica realized that Collette hadn't lost her strength when she found out she was sick. She'd gotten stronger. For as long as she was able, Collette always had a smile and a joke or some comforting words for her daughter. It was really only in the last week or two when Collette disappeared completely.

That was what had made looking after her harder and harder. She'd already been gone. Erica was crying now. Horrible, gasping, blubbering crying. She became abruptly aware of the audience as they began to sing en-masse.

This was always the worst part of the funeral in Erica's eyes. The song had no words and went on and on. There wasn't really a designated length, and as awful as it was, the more willing the people were to sing, the longer it went on. The length of the song was the measure of the people's grief, the measure of how loved the dead person was.

Collette's wasn't very long.

It wasn't that she wasn't liked, she got on well enough with everyone, she just hadn't gotten close to anyone. The people in the mart were one huge, sprawling, convoluted, complicated family. Just Collette and Erica weren't really a part of it.

Then came the procession. Erica and Neil, as the people closest to Collette picked her up from the stage, Erica at her head, and Neil at her feet. Usually there would be more people to help, but there wasn't anyone else that loved Collette, so Erica and Neil struggled alone.

They led the way out of the barn, a couple of hundred people trailing behind. Luckily they didn't have to go very far, but they had to stop to rest for a moment in the middle. People stood back and waited for them patiently and respectfully, but Erica felt the need to get it over with, so they quickly picked Collette up again.

They reached the end of the road – a wall. This was their graveyard, the final resting place for anyone who died in the camp. The bodies lay in front of it for forty eight hours after their deaths, to allow those who wished to come and say their goodbyes, but almost no-one ever did.

There were already two on the floor. As they put Collette down, Erica looked at the faces of the others. One she only vaguely recognised – one of the soldiers, she thought. She didn't really know any of the ones that hadn't come from the mart.

The other was a girl she'd known since they were children, Natalie. Natalie had been a year or two older and had joined the military resistance as soon as she was old enough. She'd never been happy sitting around in the mart with everyone else, and it had gotten her killed two days ago.

Mr. Sansom handed Erica a drawing of her mother's face and a piece of blu-tack. They had used photographs up until a few years ago, when the one remaining Polaroid camera had given up on life. Now they were down to drawings, but Erica had heard rumours the paper was running out. She wondered what would happen when it did. Then she wondered if she'd live to see it. Weirdly, they still had loads of blu-tack.

She stuck the drawing next to Natalie's. They were running out of space, and they'd all started to over-lap. Mr. Sansom gave her a pen and she wrote at the bottom of it, "Collette Hart, 1993 – 2029".

And with that, the funeral was over. The crowd dispersed and Erica was left standing alone looking at the wall. The drawing of her mother was quite good, she wondered who'd done it. A lot of the others hadn't been so lucky. Natalie's drawing was terrible, it looked nothing like her.

Erica had never really understood Natalie's urge to get up and do something. Erica was happy hanging around the mart, getting older with no real memorable events. But now... Now Erica had begun to see. It wasn't enough just to survive, you had to live. It was a cliche Erica had heard many times before – one of her mother's favourites, but she'd finally figured out what it meant.

Erica wasn't going to sit around and wait to die. She was going to do something the hell about it.

* * *

Saturday 31st August 1996 – 7.45am

They sat down the back, with Patton closest to the window. As the bus was pulling away, the puce volvo pulled into the station.

"Ha! We've lost him!" This was great!

They watched the man get out of the volvo. He walked over to the truck driver and said something. The driver turned and gestured after them. The man pulled out a gun and pointed it at the driver.

At that moment, the bus passed a large building and the gas station was out of sight. There was a distant bang, and Markus desperately tried to convince himself that it wasn't what he knew it had to be.

Markus lived about twenty minutes outside Charlotte and knew the city pretty well. He never used the buses though, and had no idea where this one was taking them. It meandered slowly out of town, then turned and headed back in. They, as far as Markus could tell, were heading to the city centre.

Somewhere in the suburbs Markus nudged Patton. "Here. We get off here."

"You can't go home."

"No, I don't live near here, we've just got to get off."

The bus stopped and they waited impatiently as an old man with a walker clambered ungainly off. He hurried away at top old-man-walker speed, which was still not very fast.

Markus started to lead Patton down a side-street. He headed deeper and deeper into a colossal neighbourhood. All the houses were clean and nice and new, and looked identical; dormer roofs, large front gardens, small porches out front.

He stopped outside one that was indistinguishable from the rest, except perhaps a little shabbier, and rang the doorbell. He glanced at his watch and groaned inwardly. It was way too early on a Saturday morning and Cecilia would probably not be happy.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 8.29pm

Erica was in her usual spot, at the front of the balcony in the barn. Right now though, she was pressed so tightly up against it that the railing was rammed right into her stomach. Someone's elbow and someone else's shoulder were pressing against her upper back, so she was forced to lean right out over the writhing crowd below.

She was fairly concerned that she'd drop the camera, but the weird angle allowed her to turn it from the masses behind her on the balcony to the people below to stage with ease. There were a couple of children placed precariously on the edge of the stage – nowhere else to put them, Erica thought to herself.

The room was packed – Erica had never seen it this full. There were all the people who usually went to these meetings, plus everyone else from the mart – what had happened last night had spread like wildfire and no-one wanted to miss out this time. Then there was what looked to be everyone from the military, which was extremely unusual – the two never really mixed en-masse like this.

And then Erica thought she recognised a lot of the people who'd arrived earlier. She would be every surprised if there was anyone in the camp that wasn't in the room, besides the sentries that were constantly on guard and John Connor himself.

Children and short people were dotted around the room on the shoulders of others. People strained and shuffled around, trying to find a slightly better view. Erica wondered how many of them would end up not being able to see or hear anything. Quite a lot, probably, the room was just too crowded.

At exactly half past, the sea of people around the door began to part. A narrow path formed which led to the stage. As Sackhoff crossed the room, the path closed behind him.

He was pushed onto the stage by the hands of the people nearby and everyone fell completely silent. Any noise now would jeopardise everyone's ability to hear what was being said.

He didn't say anything for a minute, just looked at them. They looked back. He wasn't surprised, so much as over-awed, Erica thought, but she didn't think he was gullible enough to believe that everyone in the room supported him. There were plenty that did, and plenty that didn't. But for most it was more of a morbid curiosity that drew them there. These were the people that Markus had to win over.

He held his left hand up over his head. Erica could see that it was strapped up tightly. He began to speak, and the crowd lent forward in anticipation.

"When I was a teenager, the machines sent a terminator back in time to assassinate me." This was news to everyone.

"THAT THING did this to me." He brandished his arm forcefully.

The eyes of the crowd were fixed on him. He was shouting at the top of his voice, but Erica could see many at the back straining to hear anything.

"One of them took everything from me... My entire family, two of my closest friends. And then they took away the world." A very few cheered at this, but most were mesmerised

"We created them, we trusted them with everything, and they destroyed it all." Now the crowd was behind him. There was a huge cheer and as it died out - "but it WAS OUR FAULT." The noise stopped abruptly

"They are things. THEY cannot FEEL, or LOVE, or DIE. And we treated them like PEOPLE." No-one was sure where this was going.

"That was our mistake. They are things, and we confided our deepest, most trusted secrets in them, and they DESTROYED OUR WORLD. And one among us has started to trust them again."

There was a sick feeling in the pit of Erica's stomach that had very little to do with the railing. Sackhoff was going to do it, he was going to take power from Connor. Maybe not in name, but any minute now he was going to win the hearts of a third of the human race. And it would destroy them all.

"Earlier today, the machine we have invited into our home killed three of our people." Sackhoff looked around. He knew he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. "Instead of killing it right there and then, JOHN CONNOR took out it's brain. He took out it's brain and is, at this moment, trying to fix it."

"John Connor IS IN LOVE WITH A MACHINE!"

No-one knew how to react. It hit Erica like a ton of bricks – it was true. She'd seen enough over the last two days to know that it was true. That look in his eyes when Alison had come in that door...

"And John Connor -" He lowered his voice to normal speaking level, but he might as well have been whispering. Erica just about made it out. "is trying to make it into one of us."

The people who'd heard erupted. Those that couldn't hear joined in anyway because they knew whatever he'd said had been huge.

The thing was, Erica couldn't tell if they agreed with Sackhoff or not. Some clearly did, and some clearly didn't, and both were shouting about it at the top of their voices. There were some who just seemed to be shouting for the sake of it, because it seemed to be the thing to do.

She relaxed a little. Maybe Sackhoff wouldn't win. Connor just needed to get his side in, but Erica knew that wouldn't happen until Alison was fixed, and who knew how long that would take.

Sackhoff smiled. He was smart, he knew it wasn't a slam-dunk, but it was written all over his face that he had another ace up his sleeve.

"AND -" The audience, who'd almost forgotten him in their fervour, turned back. "He's been lying to us all. Camp thirty-eight has been destroyed." There was an audible intake of breath. "Not only that, but six others have been destroyed over the last few months. There are six camps left, including us. There are two thousand five hundred people left in the human race."

No-one knew what to do. How are you supposed to react to that? So nobody did anything. "He wants us to fight this battle on Tuesday morning, with no plan, no back-up, no hope. JOHN CONNOR WILL LEAD US ALL TO OUR END!"

A woman wailed. It was desperate, aching, painful, agonising. Erica had never heard anything like it, and she hoped she never would again. It went on and on until no-one could bear it any longer. As soon as it died off, everything exploded.

Pro-Sackhoff supporters turned on their pro-Connor neighbours. People from the mart who had grown up together attacked each other. Soldiers who had fought together, bled together, were now fighting each other, making each other bleed.

Sackhoff stood on the stage, watching. Nobody was paying him any attention any-more, the crowd had taken off on their own. His face was blank, and Erica was too far away to be quite sure, but there was a look about him, the way he stood. He was ready to fight, but Erica didn't think this was what he had intended. She didn't think he'd wanted to divide the people, not now, not right before the Final Battle.

Then something happened. Someone elbowed their way to the front of the crowd, side-stepping the brawling masses. One of the children sitting on the stage helped the old man up.

Mr. Sansom started to shout. "Stop! Stop!" He might not have even been there, for all the attention most people paid him, but one or two people looked up.

"LISTEN TO ME!" Another one or two. Slowly, the crowd started to hear him. When enough had stopped fighting, Mr. Sansom began to speak.

"What the hell are you doing? Look at yourselves!" Some of the audience sheepishly straightened clothes and wiped their bloody noses. "WE HAVE A CHANCE!"

"There is a chance to end this terrible terrible war. We can do this. We can make it so our children grow up in a world where they aren't constantly looking over their shoulders, constantly watching, constantly waiting to die."

"WE CAN HAVE PEACE!"

This sentence reverberated through the room. Even the most viscously fighting couples turned to listen.

"We can do this, we can win. All we have to do is stick together. I don't know who's right. I don't know if John Connor is still the best person to lead us." Angry shouts, but Mr. Sansom hushed them.

"I cannot count how many times John Connor's leadership has saved my life. Can you?"

"He deserves the benefit of the doubt. He deserves our respect. He deserves the chance to save us again. He deserves the chance to save us all."

"Now go home."

Tensions were still high, but Erica was pretty sure Mr. Sansom had just prevented an all out civil war.


	8. Chapter 8

Saturday 31st August – 8.42am

A bedraggled woman in her late forties opened the door, wearing a plaid shirt that was too big for her, and little else. Last night's make-up was smeared across her face, which lit up when she saw him.

"Markus! Come in! Hang on a second, I'll just get rid of last night." He'd underestimated how much she liked him, clearly.

She ushered them inside, and they found themselves in a large-ish sitting room. In here was much dirtier – there were wine bottles and full-to-the-brim ashtrays everywhere. Here and there were articles of clothing, some of them Cecilia's, and some, presumably, belonging to "last night".

"It's not safe."

Markus ignored Patton and headed straight to the corner where he sat, ignoring a very questionable stain, at a piano. The rest of the scene played out to a bastardized version of "Clair de lune" - he could still only use one hand.

Cecilia roared; "Get out!" There was muffled scrambling coming from upstairs.

"You're still rushing that middle section. Why are you only playing right handed?" she added to the unconcerned Markus.

Presently, a stark naked man appeared at the top of the stairs. He took stock of the situation, noticed Patton and froze.

"Out! Get out!" Cecilia roared in a half-joking manner. The poor man didn't seem to catch on and looked utterly terrified. He sheepishly came down the stairs, gathered his clothes from around the room, all while Cecilia roared abuse. She was a singer, as well as a piano teacher (and artist, and many other things. Markus gathered a lot of them were slightly shady) and her shouts were impressively loud.

She clearly didn't mean any of it, but the naked man didn't seem to understand that, and winced every time she called him a faggot, or a retard. Markus winced along with him, but for different reasons. He loved Cecilia like a second mother, but she really could be a little more PC.

The guy looked back at Markus and Patton carefully. There was a glimmer of recognition in his eyes, just for a minute. As he left, he looked wistfully at his shirt, but dared not ask for it back. He meandered unsteadily down the garden path, and Cecilia watched, slightly regretful. "Nice guy. Nice arse. Wish I remembered his name."

She shrugged with an oh-well sort of attitude and slammed the door.

Markus stopped playing when she said, "Now, let me look at you, I haven't seen you in months." Truthfully, Markus just hadn't bothered to come visit once his piano lessons had finished for the year, and she read it all over his face. She didn't comment though, and said instead "C'mere, gimme a hug."

This made Markus feel a whole pile more guilty. Cecilia didn't have a lot of consistent people in her life.

She pounced on him, almost before he could get up, and clung tight for a moment before recoiling. "Gawd, you really smell. Who's the young wan?" She was ignoring the elephant-shaped-news-report in the room.

In typical Cecilia manner, as she said this, she cycled through various accents. Over the years, he'd heard Russian, Chinese, Indian, Australian, Polish, English, French, South African, Nigerian - the list could go on. Her favourites though were a sort-of Cork accent, and a hybrid Southern one, and it was these she used now. Markus still had no idea where she was from originally; she never would tell him.

"My arm, I think it's fractured."

Cecilia nodded and examined the arm. "I'm not a doctor kid. You should get this looked at."

"No hospitals," Patton announced.

"Ah, it speaks. Does it have a name?"

"Patton," Markus said, matter of factly, "but that's about all I know."

"I can wrap this tightly and it'll probably be okay. Although when I was twenty-two I fell over roller-blading away from some nasty drug-dealers and hurt my arm. Didn't get it looked at, and it still hurts when I lift something heavy. Just don't say I didn't warn you."

Cecilia told a lot of stories like this, and Markus never knew if she was telling the truth. This time he thought she probably was.

He didn't really care, he just wanted it not to hurt.

"Have a shower first though. And there's a spare toothbrush in the bathroom. I'll dig out some clothes." She turned to look at Patton. "You don't smell nearly as bad. I don't have anything kid sized."

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 9.16pm

Joan and the radio-woman from earlier were practically beating down the door. "Connor! CONNOR!"

Erica, coming down the corridor outside Connor's room, hadn't know Joan could be so loud. She was turning out to be a bit of a bad-ass.

The radio-woman turned to Erica. "Came to warn him too?"

Erica nodded.

"We've been trying. He's been locked in there most of the afternoon. We think he's trying to fix her chip. He came out for a minute to get her body. Wouldn't let anyone help, he just dragged her off and disappeared back into his room."

The radio-woman sighed. "We need him. I just don't know what else we can do."

Joan gave up on her banging too.

"Did you know there's no security guard in the corridor between the mart and here any-more?" Erica asked them.

"No," said Joan worriedly. "But I'm not surprised. People have stopped showing up for duty all over the camp. Some of the soldiers have even resigned and moved out to the mart."

"I didn't know they could do that any-more"

This had happened a couple of times over the years – someone got injured, or just couldn't fight any longer. But never more than one every couple of years. For more than one to leave at once -

"They can't. We still need them to fight, and they will. But they just don't want to follow Connor any-more They say they'll come back if he's replaced. This is what Sackhoff wanted all along. He just wanted power." Joan's eyes were lit up furiously.

Erica didn't quite think this was true. Sackhoff had been a loyal commander to Connor for the entire war, she didn't see why he would suddenly become a power-grabbing-meglomanic right now, just as Connor was starting to lose it. But she didn't understand Sackhoff any-more either.

She knew what she had to do.

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 9.20pm

Phew. Big moment. Kinda scary.

Erica raised her hand and knocked.

"Come in."

Erica's legs didn't really want to work any-more, but she slowly pushed the door open. As she did, a wave of music rushed over her. It was beautiful and well-played, but every once in a while there was a jarring discordant note.

"Um, yeah, hi." This wasn't going well.

He didn't even look up from the piano, just kept playing, back to her. She looked around the room, trying to gather her thoughts. It was tidy, almost pathologically so. The bed was made. Some clothes were folded on a chair. A bookshelf was full of old, mismatched but well-looked-after notebooks.

The music stopped. He picked up a pencil, wrote something in the notebook that was propped up in front of him, closed it, put the pencil down. He slipped back on his hand support and then Sackhoff turned to look at her. There was an intelligence in his eyes that Erica hadn't seen before. "Sit."

Erica sat. There was a chair nearby.

"What do you want?" It was said kindly, but with a note of tired resignation.

"I'd like to interview you, if that's okay."

"Why?"

She didn't really know how to answer that, but said "I'm trying to get to as many people as I can."

"Yes, but why me, why now? It's getting late. You weren't interested in me this morning."

"I was busy and -" She hesitated, was this going too far? "You weren't as interesting this morning."

He roared with laughter. It made her jump.

"Alright. Get on with it."

"Oh, okay, thanks."

Not what she'd been expecting, but totally great. She shuffled around setting up, white balancing, checking eye-lines, playing with the composition

"Can you say something?"

"Something. Why?"

"Sound check."

"Oh, right. Um, I'm saying things, lots of things, they're very interesting. Can I stop now?"

Erica smothered a laugh. "Yeah, thanks."

She sat back down and said "Okay!" brightly as she pressed record.

"Markus Sackhoff."

"That's me."

He wasn't at all like Erica had been expecting. He was kinder, softer, more child-like and a whole lot less scary. She liked him."Why'd you do it?"

"The speech?"

Erica nodded.

"You've seen him. He's loosing it. He thinks she's a person. He thinks she loves him back." Sackhoff leaned in towards her. "She's a machine. She's not even a she. How can a machine love?"

Erica didn't know, but she asked "Does that make him a bad leader though?"

"When I met him first – I had this friend. How can you have a twelve-year-old who is so grown up, and then there's John, still very much a child in his mother's shadow."

"No, it doesn't make him a bad leader. Well, I mean it didn't. I've seen this growing within him for years, ever since he saw her, when she was pretending to be human I mean."

"So what changed?"

He shrugged.

"Everything. This plan of his... I mean the communication thing is great and if we pull if off..."

He stopped and smiled, "Could you imagine if we pulled it off?"

Erica let him think for a moment, and then he said -

"But it's totally nuts. It won't work. And all of those people in the mart who've never fought a battle before, all those young soldiers I've trained and fought with, and looked after, they're all going to die. And then who'll be left to look after the people here – the old, the sick, the children?"

He was definitely charismatic, Erica would give him that. Her own faith in Connor began to shake a little.

He was on a roll now. "And the thing is, it's all dependant on her. We only have her word for it that it's actually happening. We only have her word for it that she's not connected to the link any-more We only have her word for it that she's on our side now."

"But then what happened this afternoon? Surely the fact that she tried to kill everyone shows that she'd been working for us before and something flipped or something? Otherwise, why risk all that she'd worked for? If you're right, we were doing exactly what she wanted anyway - what the machines wanted."

Sackhoff nodded. "You're a smart kid. Yeah, I've been wondering that myself too. But I mean maybe she got new orders or something. I don't know how their minds work. And even if she had been on our side before, surely she connected to the link this afternoon and told them everything."

He paused. "What happened this afternoon is why I had to do what I did."

Erica couldn't really argue with that. So instead she said - "You knew about the camps though. You've know that since it happened."

"Yeah, I did."

"So you lied?"

"Dramatic licence."

"Did you lie about anything else? Did one of them try to kill you when you were younger? Did they kill your friends, your family?"

He smiled sadly. "I wish I'd made that up. No, that's true."

"It all is? The hand."

He laughed outright.

"I fell over a table when I was drunk."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Do you think you'd be a better leader than Connor?"

"A few months ago, no."

"Now?"

"Now I think anyone would be a better leader than Connor."

"It's that bad?"

He nodded. "It's that bad."

* * *

Sunday 14th October 2029 – 9.42pm

After she'd finished the interview, Erica went back to the mart. There were people everywhere, and it was a whole lot nosier than usual. No-one was actually physically fighting, but she could see a few that were close.

She passed Mr. Sansom, sitting up in his cot. He nodded at her.

"Can't sleep Mr. Sansom?"

"Could you after today?"

Erica shrugged and kept walking.

Without even changing into her pyjamas, Erica collapsed onto her bunk, face down. She buried her head into the pillow.

It had been the longest and worst day of her life. As she fell asleep she wondered if tomorrow and the day after would be worse.

* * *

Saturday 31st August 1996 – 9.08

Cecilia had a whole bathroom full of smelly girly crap, so Markus came out of the shower smelling of flowers and coconut, but he was clean and he didn't care. He hadn't pissed in a day and a half and doing so was a massive relief. Brushing his teeth was incredible too, it felt like there were years of plaque that he was scrubbing away.

He emerged from the bathroom to find Patton waiting patiently in the hall, stock still, back to the wall. Wordlessly, she walked past him, and a few seconds later he heard the shower.

Back downstairs, he could hear something frying and smelt something delicious. He tried to remember the last time he'd actually eaten something, and couldn't. Then it hit him – dinner with his family two days ago. He tried not to think about it.

There were clothes on the couch that looked like a decent fit, but then he looked at them properly.

"Cecilia! What the hell?!"

She called out from the kitchen. "They're fine."

"Fine" was a multi-coloured aran jumper that looked like the knitting machine blew up, a Hawaiian-print shirt, khaki military pants and sandals that were at least two sizes too big. He was going to stand out like a hooker in a convent.

* * *

Monday 15th October 2029 – 5.12am

Neil was shaking Erica awake. "Come on!"

Erica had learned not to question Neil when he did things like this; it always led to something interesting. She grabbed her camera and silently followed him out of the darkened room. He pulled her down some corridors. She was too sleep to pay attention to where they were going, but they ended up somewhere outside the farmhouse.

"Damn, the door was open a minute ago." His face fell. Clearly, the interesting thing was inside the farmhouse.

Erica laughed inwardly and pushed open the door.

"No, what are you doing? What -?"

"I'm allowed in, you idiot," she said, waving the camera in his face. "Just say you're my sound guy if anyone asks"

"We don't have sound equipment."

Erica shrugged. No-one would care anyway.

The farmhouse was pretty busy for this hour of the morning. Everyone lined the edges, and a couple of people shifted around to give Erica, Neil and, most importantly, the camera, a good view. Sackhoff stood in the middle of the room. In front of him were five dirty and bloodied soldiers Erica didn't recognise them.

One of them, man in his thirties, was saying, "It was on us. Maddie got shot, and we had to leave him. I'm still not really sure how we got away."

"We'll send out someone to look for Maddie - George," Sackhoff said, nodding at the radio-woman, George, who started elbowing her way out of the room to make it happen, but the man said, "No point. If the machines didn't get him, he's still dead by now."

"Okay."

George went back to her place. The man wobbled and shook a little, and Erica noticed a big gash across the back of his head.

"Can you continue?" Sackhoff sounded concerned.

The man took a minute to steady himself, and then said "Yeah. Um, yeah, I was saying Maddie's dead. We all had these little explosives with us. I heard Maddie's go off as we left."

"Do you think he got the terminator?" The woman-solider next to him spoke up suddenly.

"That's the only thing that makes sense really. I don't see how we'd have gotten away otherwise," the man said. "That's pretty much it. We didn't have too much trouble after that. There was a patrol about half a click back, but we hid behind a car and they didn't see us."

"How many of you left from thirty four? Nineteen?"

"Yeah, it was supposed to be nineteen, but seven more volunteered before we left." He looked Sackoff square in the eye.

"Five of us made it. Five out of twenty-six. I hope their deaths are worth something to you."


	9. Chapter 9

Monday 15th October 2029 – 6.02am

"Connor's gone missing, there are machines everywhere. The question shouldn't be how we complete the plan, the question should be whether we attempt it at all!"

Everyone was still in the farmhouse, except the new arrivals, who'd been taken to get cleaned up.

The argument had divided into so many different factions that Erica couldn't really keep them straight any-more.

"Connor is our leader. We do as he says until the day he dies, or the day we all die."

It kind of boiled down in to three main ones – those who wanted Connor to remain their leader and believed in the plan, those who wanted Connor out, but still supported the plan and those who thought they'd be better off without either.

"The day we all die will come a lot faster if Connor is left in charge."

"You're just too scared to do what's necessary."

"We're all scared. You should be too."

Sackhoff stood in the corner. Erica watched him closely. He was the person most likely to be humanity's next leader, and it looked like he had no idea what to do.

"Look, we're getting nowhere."

"Well, what do you think we should do?"

"I think we wait for Connor to tell us."

This was met with groans all around.

"Connor is useless. He's nothing. He's locked himself up in his room with that broken machine. He cares more about her than about us, and I say good riddance!"

Most people in the room shook or nodded their heads. The rest waved their hands about and everyone loudly expressed their opinion. And then the door started to open. They looked at each other, confused – everyone who needed to be in the room already was.

John Connor walked in.

Some of those who'd been denouncing him looked ashamed and guilty, others looked even more angry than before. A lot of people looked relieved, while some looked at him as though he were their Messiah. Sackhoff was expressionless.

Alison followed him.

At this the room exploded again. A couple of people lunged aggressively at her, while one woman shouted loudly that Alison had killed her best friend yesterday. Others held the aggressors back, but no-one was happy. Voices were raised loudly, and any semblance of rationality vanished.

Connor's voice cut through the noise, and people gradually consented to listen.

"I know – I know you have doubted me. I know you feel betrayed. I know you have questions, and I know you are worried. I am too. This plan is a little nuts." There were murmurs, but no-one dared challenge him outright. "It is a little nuts, but it is our only hope."

He looked around. "It is our only hope. Two thousand, four hundred and eighty seven."

"Two thousand, four hundred and eighty seven." They were listening now. "That's it. That's all that's left of the human race. We are all that's left of the human race."

"We have all watched, over the years. We have watched our numbers dwindle slowly. People get killed, people die of illness or starvation. People die from accidents because all of the crap we use every day is so old and worn out. We are dying off one by one."

"Two thousand, four hundred and eighty seven. We are dying off at a rate of thirty-seven percent per year. By 2036, there'll be less than one hundred of us left. That's seven years from now. Seven years from now, all the people in this room will be dead. But there will be no hope for humanity long before that."

"If we do this, sure, we might all die. But if we don't, if we do nothing, humanity is dead anyway. This. Is. Our. Only. Chance."

Connor grabbed a chair and sat down. They gaped at him. "Okay, let's get this sorted out. Who's first?"

* * *

aturday 31st August 1996 – 9.12 am

Cecilia placed a chickpea and tofu omelette in front of Markus. It had some vegetable coloured lumps inside it, and a whole heap of avocado on top. There was some sort of sauce – green with little flecks of orange in it. Cecilia was an ambitious, if not always successful, chef.

The food was, for once, pretty good, and they both wolfed it down. "Okay," Cecilia began, "I saw the news Markus... Now they're saying you've kidnapped this girl."

"I didn't hurt anyone. Patton didn't either."

"I know. Of course, I mean, I know. But it's good to hear you say it. So that guy's after you?" She looked at Patton "You too?"

Markus started trying to explain, but Cecilia held up her hand to silence him; "actually, I don't wanna know. But you can crash here for a while if you want."

He was still exhausted, and sleep sounded amazing right now, but Patton shook her head. "We need to get going. We're meeting someone."

This was the first indication Markus had that Patton knew more than she was letting on, but her face gave nothing away. She was right though, it wasn't safe to stay.

Cecilia ran upstairs for a moment, and came back with a brown clay pot that looked home-made. It probably was. Inside were wads and wads of cash, a couple thousand at least. Markus tried to thank her, but she stopped him again.

"While you were in the shower, I got together some things." She handed him an old backpack.

There was a knock at the door.

Crap. Cecilia waved them back, and they stood silently in the kitchen.

She opened the front door. "Ma'am, we've received a report that you were seen harbouring fugitives."

Police. It could have been worse. But if the police had found them, the man-from-the-puce-volvo wouldn't be far behind.

As quietly as they could, they headed for the back door, but there was the shadow of someone already outside. A large dark someone.

They legged it back into the kitchen. Patton clambered up onto the counter, forced open the window and wiggled her way out. Markus followed, but he was a lot bigger than her, and was semi-stuck when the man entered the room.

Patton pulled, and they were down behind the wall outside when the first shots rang out. Two of the four police officers forced their way past Cecilia. More shots, and the man kept coming.

Patton and Markus ran round the side of the house and out the front. They were a small way down the road when the policemen spotted them. He shouted and gave chase, but it just made him and his partner easy targets for volvo-man when he came out the front door. He walked straight past Cecilia.

Until - "Markus!" She screamed at the top of her considerably sized lungs. "In the bag Mar-"

The man turned and suddenly, coolly, shot her twice in the chest and once in the head.

Markus' ears rang, his head spun. He turned and started to run back to the house. He wasn't sure what he was going to do, but before he got more than a couple of feet, Patton had tackled him to the ground. At that moment, there was a gunshot, and Markus realized that tackle had saved him twice over.

"Do not get yourself killed."

These words were all Markus needed and he nodded. She quickly let him up, and they raced down the street, hiding behind cars, dodging bullets.

Markus saw a man come out of his house and get shot for his troubles. Markus couldn't tell if he was dead or not. A teenage girl too, thirty seconds later.

Patton smashed the side window of an ancient car, and unlocked it from the inside. "Get in!"

As Markus risked his way round the other side, the car burst into life. Patton's head was under the dash as he got in, and she wasted no time in slamming her foot down on the accelerator.

"You're what, eleven, twelve? How do you know how to drive? Or hot-wire a car?"

It dawned on Markus that they had much bigger problems as they roared at top speed towards the crazy-man-with-a-gun.

Patton slammed full force into the guy. There was a sickening metallic sort of thud – not really the sound you'd expect from someone being hit by a car. The man flipped over the roof and rolled off as they got away.

As they left the estate, Markus glanced back – the man was gone.

* * *

Monday 15th October 2029 – 10.47am

Erica rushed back into the mart. It was deserted – most were training, at the farm or at school, although Erica had seen a large contingent of older civilians hiding out down the end of the hall outside. Bottles were being passed around and most were pretty drunk. She'd be surprised if it let out before everyone left for the Final Battle.

Erica hated calling it that. It was so... final. It suggested everything was going to end, one way or the other, but she doubted it would be so clean cut. If they won, the machines wouldn't suddenly disappear and the whole world wouldn't be magically fixed. If they lost – well, she preferred not to think about it.

But if they did loose, well the human race wouldn't immediately stop either. Sure they'd be pretty fucking screwed, but she was sure all of the few survivors would be able to look forward to many more months of cowering, fear, and final inevitable death.

Erica had just come back for a change of clothes and a new camera battery. The meeting was still going on and she wanted to get back. She hadn't been recording that much – she was starting to be worried about running out of tape. She had a decent stockpile left, but she didn't want to waste it. And anyway, the documentary was already several hours long, and she had no way to edit.

It was really fascinating, the meeting. They'd almost finished nailing down tactics and timing and logistics and a whole bunch of other things that Erica didn't really understand, but even the smallest thing had to be argued about, and compromised on and then, finally, agreed on.

She got the impression that they didn't put this much effort into all their battles, but this was the biggest one, with the highest stakes, that anyone had ever attempted, and they wanted – needed to get it right.

Connor had been magnificent. He'd listened to everyone, brought them to agreement, found the best way to do everything. But it was more than that – he inspired them, he got them to think more, think better. He had led them. People just believed in him, and all doubts about his leadership, at least for the moment, fell to the side. It was incredible to watch.

She was just thinking about all this, and pulling on a jumper, when shouts and jeers from out in the hall caught her attention. Camera in hand, she went outside to see what was going on. The drunk people had migrated up the hall. They were now very fixated on something that was happening in their middle, and Erica pushed her way through.

The corridor was quite wide, and the people had pushed back to the edges to make a space in the middle. Alison was lying on the floor, curled in the foetal position. Two or three of the men surrounding her were kicking and beating her mercilessly. The crowd jeered and whistled and baited them on. Neil stood to one side. He was drunk, and enjoying himself as much as everyone else.

Erica started to record. She stood there for a few minutes with everyone else, watching as these men beat Alison to a pulp. Her skeleton was metal, so Erica didn't really think she could have any broken bones, but she had real skin, and it was bloody and bruised. In some places, Alison's metal had begun to show through.

Erica knew that Alison was a machine. She knew it, she did. But looking at Alison's face – it was blank, completely. Erica had never seen a human face look like that, so empty. But she couldn't help wondering what was going on behind that face.

Was there any point in beating Alison? Could she feel physical pain? Emotional pain? Could she get angry? Would she, could she fight back? She wasn't making any attempt at the moment, but would she – snap?

The only real reason Erica could see to beating Alison was a sort of weird catharsis. Alison represented everything that was wrong with the world. Everything outside of the base was Alison's fault by proxy, and everything within the base was Alison's fault, because it just was; the internal divisions, Connor's lack of leadership, Sackhoff's grab for power.

Everything was Alison's fault, and Erica found herself joining in the cheering. Everything that had been inside of Erica, all the emotions from her entire life, every single time one of them had taken something, someone from her, from any of them, all of that came out right now. She cheered the men on; Alison deserved everything she got.

Eventually, the men tired out. The crowd wandered off in groups, and a big clump of them returned to their spot at the end of the corridor. Erica was left standing alone, camera still recording, pointed at Alison's face.

After a moment, Alison began to move. She stood up unsteadily.

She looked Erica in the eye.

"I came to find you. The meeting's over. John's looking for you."


	10. Chapter 10

Saturday 31st August 1996 – 11.33pm

A long drive in a stolen car. They'd abandoned it in a car-park outside Miami.

Markus flopped down onto the bed. Cecilia hadn't gotten around to wrapping his arm and it twinged as it hit the mattress. Patton had found a Chinese place near the motel, and they'd had a decent meal.

He looked at her as she emptied the bag Cecilia had given them. She pulled out a bright red baseball cap. Was anyone missing her? She pulled out a gun. He thought not.

Now that the only people who were chasing them were the police – who probably weren't out to kill them – Markus felt safe enough to sleep the night through, but found that he couldn't. He didn't trust the bedspread.

His mind flew away without him, and thought followed thought quicker than he could keep up. But there was one thought he could not get rid of.

Ten definite. Seven maybe. That was how many people had died because of him. And those were only the ones he knew about, he was sure there were more.

"Patton?"

"Yes."

"Did you get the name of the truck driver?"

"No."

That made it worse. Ten definite, seven maybe.

* * *

Monday 15th October 2029 – 11.53am

"I think we're done." Erica stopped recording.

Connor nodded. "Thanks. Now get out."

* * *

Sunday 1st September 1996 – 11.32am

The IHOP was busy, and they kept their heads low. Markus pulled the baseball cap low over his face. They'd had a good night's sleep and he felt kind of okay – physically at least, for the first time in days. Emotionally, he was pretty rocky.

"We need a plan."

"I have one," Patton said vaguely, watching the people outside – or at least, she was trying to; she wasn't quite tall enough to see over the top of the booth. The waitress came over. "Can I get you something?"

"Markus." Patton warned. Markus ignored her.

"Pancakes," he said firmly.

"Yeah? What kind of panc-"

"Markus!" Patton got up and started to pull him out of the booth. He looked over his shoulder. The man-from-the-puce-volvo was walking down the street outside.

"No." Markus was in shock. "No, it can't be. We killed him."

"Killed who?" this was from the waitress. She was looking at their faces now. "Hey, you're tha-"

"Yeah, I am. I didn't hurt anyone, and we need to get out of here."

"You just said -"

"Yeah, well he's over there, so clearly he's fine." Markus gestured at the man-from-the-puce-volvo who'd started to come in the door and the waitress seemed to catch on.

"Follow me." She led them down the back and into the kitchen.

"You can't bring them back here!" some sort of manager complained half-heartedly. The waitress ignored him.

"Why are you helping us?" Markus asked.

"I've been in a couple of... misunderstandings with the law myself." The waitress pushed open a door to an alley out the back. "Good luck."

The manager-guy started shouting distantly. "You can't be -"

There was a gunshot. Markus and Patton looked at each other and started to run, Markus shouting back at the waitress, "Get out of here!"

But it was too late. Just as they got to the end of the alley, the man-from-the-puce-volvo came out of the door. The waitress stood in his way; Markus hoped she wasn't trying to buy them time, she'd get herself killed. But it looked like she was.

"Woah Mister. Where do you think you're -?" And he shot her in the head.

There was a time, just a day or two ago, when this would have floored Markus but he was kind of getting used to it. They kept running, down the street.

"This way." Patton led him into a large mall. Shops lined both sides and there were people everywhere – families, teenagers. This wasn't good.

"Lose the cap. Stop running," Patton ordered as she pulled her hair into a ponytail. "And the jumper."

She pulled off her cardigan too, as Markus lifted the jumper over his head. This was hard to do one-handed, and Patton had to stop and help him.

As they passed a news stand, Markus noticed a headline "Sansom Behind in Polls". The election. Markus had totally forgotten about it. He supposed it didn't really matter too much who the president was – he'd probably be shot before then. He just had no idea why.

There were screams behind them. He was here. Markus hoped he hadn't killed anyone else – he hadn't heard any shots. Just the sight of volvo-man with a gun in his hand was definitely enough to cause screams.

People started running every-which-way. Patton's theory was to blend in as much as possible, so they ran too. Markus pulled the gun out of his bag. This was what Cecilia had been trying to tell him about when she got shot. Having it made him feel safer.

There were shots. Markus risked a look backwards. It wasn't the man this time – there were three security guards shooting at him. But the bullets were bouncing off. Markus tripped over his too-big sandals.

He filed the magic-bouncing-bullets into his worry-about-it-later category. He really was getting better at this running-for-his-life business. Volvo-man shot back at the security guards and they fell in rapid succession. Crap.

There was an exit ahead.

* * *

Monday 15th October 2029 – 3.15pm

Joan had spent the last ten minutes trying to shuffle them into straight lines, but it was finally done. They were divided into their eight groups – about twenty, give or take, in each.

Some stood proudly to attention, while others slouched and clearly couldn't give a damn. Erica didn't blame them; the whole thing was a farce. Training that, under normal circumstances, would have taken weeks had been condensed into two days, and after interviewing them, Erica knew that very few of them thought they had learned anything that would be useful when trying to break in to a Skynet base.

Plus, no-one there had gone through any screenings, or tests, or interviews to determine whether or not they were even remotely suited to being soldiers – they were the bottom of the barrel, drafted out of desperation. And most of them really didn't want to be there.

There hadn't even been enough uniforms to go around – some were wearing jackets or shirts, while others wore pants, combined with the best of whatever they had themselves. None of the uniforms fit properly either, and Erica wished they hadn't bothered – they would have looked much better if they'd just worn their own clothes.

She walked up and down the lines as Connor talked about the "noble sacrifice" that they were giving to "protect and serve the human race". She focused in on certain faces – those of the most devout and those of the most resentful. Neil was one of those who looked like they wished they were anywhere else, but Erica was not sure why – did he not believe in the cause? Not believe in Connor? Was he just scared?

There was a lot of fear around the camp. Most thought this plan was doomed and would incite massive reprisals from the machines. But there was hope too, or at least the seeds of hope; was it possible, just maybe, that they could pull this off? Despite lack of leadership and a coherent plan and with soldiers so inexperienced that they might very well shoot themselves in the foot by accident. If this worked... And that was about as far as anyone Erica had talked to went. It was almost like they didn't want to jinx it by saying it out loud.

Connor finished his speech and started to walk up and down the lines, repeating the same rehearsed couple of sentences of congratulations to each new graduate. Erica quickly stood back, and tried to capture the faces of some of the soldiers as Connor spoke to them.

There was a lot of awe – even the most resentful of them still admired and respected John Connor. He was almost like a religion himself. He had rescued humanity in its darkest moment and had saved them so many times since then. The doubts on most of their faces slipped away as he congratulated them, but there were a few, more than a few, whose faces distorted into a mask of utter hatred and disgust as he shook their hands.

And then the ceremony was over. Connor returned to the stage and asked the couple of hundred watching civilians in the barn to leave. Once the room was clear, he nodded to some soldiers who were stationed around the room, and they pulled the massive barn doors closed. Erica didn't think she'd ever seen them closed before. It was just Connor, a couple of soldiers and the new graduates now.

"I know you're scared," he began. It seemed a little patronizing. "I'm scared too. But we have to be brave, we have to face this together, and we have to triumph. Joan," he added, nodding at her, "will give you your parts in the plan. This is the last time I will speak to you as a group before we leave, so I wish you the best of luck."

At this, he left the stage. There was silence as everyone watched him leave – the soldiers had to open the doors a crack to let him out. As soon as he was gone, everyone relaxed out of their lines – some began to talk to each other. There was a sense of underwhelmed relief. That hadn't been so bad after all.

Joan took to the stage. "Attention!" she barked. The troops looked at her surprised – the formal bit was over, wasn't it?

"Attention!" she repeated. Reluctantly, they rearranged themselves roughly back into their lines, although they were not as neat as they had been before. She stared at them as they did so, and did not start speaking until she was completely satisfied.

"Sevens and eights will be coordinating with the soldiers from camp three. They will infiltrate the building ahead of Connor's strike force, and clear it of as many machines as possible." There was muttering, a few groans and a couple of shouts. This wasn't popular.

"Fours and sixes will be assigned to work with my squad and we will lead the offense around the back of the building." More complaints.

"Ones, twos, threes and fives will be involved in the assault at the front of the building. This is to be our distraction, and where we anticipate the bulk of the fight to take place." This almost sparked a mutiny. There were shouts of "cannon fodder" and people broke out of their lines, fury in their eyes. But there was nothing to do, no-one to fight, no way to make this better. This was the plan, and there were no other options.

Still, Joan and the remaining soldiers exited the room with no delay, leaving the troops ready to riot, but no-one to riot at.

* * *

Sunday 1st September 1996 – 11.41am

Markus turned to run down the street, but Patton shook her head and pointed towards a tall office building. He went with it – Patton was usually right.

Through the lobby – the receptionist shouted something incomprehensible at them as they ran past.

"Sorry, our mom works upstairs," Markus shouted back as they disappeared into the stairway.

"I thought we were safer taking the lift," Markus panted two flights up. He wasn't nearly as fit as he liked to think and all this running was killing him. Patton, on the other hand, was totally fine as she said, "he'll expect it now."

"Why are we going upstairs? We're totally trapped now."

"We'll slip past him."

"Oh. So we just have to slip past the crazed serial killer. Can we take the lift on the way down?"

Patton turned off inside the building.

"But there's more stairs! Aren't we going to climb all those lovely stairs?" Markus asked. He was trying to make Patton smile as a sort of experiment. She didn't.

"Now the lift."

Markus was putting a lot of trust in the military knowledge of a twelve year old he'd known for, like, a day.

They went through a crowded office, trying to blend in as much as they could. Markus thought they got away with it – no-one looked too closely.

There were screens hanging from the ceiling showing the news – something somewhere had blown up. From the half finished articles on the computers and the dramatic front pages framed on the walls, Markus surmised it was a newspaper office.

They got into the elevator. It was crowded, and they got some funny looks off the trendy twenty-something office-people. Markus wasn't surprised at this – he was an out-of-breath teenager in a Hawaiian shirt and sandals, and Patton was a twelve-year-old. You didn't come across that combination a lot in office buildings. On holidays maybe, but not in an office building.

The elevator reached the top floor, and they all got out. The man-from-the-puce-volvo was coming straight down the corridor. He saw them.

"Crap. What do we do?" Markus asked under his breath. The man had put away his gun and, while he was getting some funny looks, people weren't running in the opposite direction.

The stairs were on the other side of the building and the elevator had already been called away. There was a door nearby. There was no way of telling where it led, but it was literally their only option. They rushed through it. Stairs. Leading upward. But they were on the top floor.

They opened the door at the top, and Markus finally figured it out – the roof. He was thick. There were a couple of people standing around chatting and smoking.

"Get behind there," he yelled, pointing at the shed-thing they'd come out of "and don't make a sound."

They looked at him blankly. If they were too stupid to listen, then they deserved what they got. He turned to Patton.

"Okay, what's the plan?"

Patton looked, for the first time, like a twelve year old. "I don't know,"

"What? You said you had a plan."

Patton didn't respond – she was looking around, weighing up options.

"Okay. Okay. Um. We can't let him catch us. We don't know what he wants." Markus was kind of panicking now.

"Over to the side."

Markus followed instructions. Patton climbed up onto the little wall running around the edge, dragging Markus with her. He did not like where this was going.

"We jump," Patton was completely matter-of-fact.

They were at least fifteen stories up. There was no surviving that.

"What? No! I did not go through all this just to give up now."

Patton grabbed his head, and turned it so he had to look at her. "We don't know what he wants. This is better."

There was a kind of logic to that, Markus supposed, but it went against everything he believed. Volvo-man came out the door, gun firmly back in hand. He'd taken his time getting here. How many were dead downstairs?

The smoking people screamed and ran in all directions. It bought Markus and Patton a few minutes while the man shot them one by one – enough time to get away.


	11. Chapter 11

Sunday 1st September 1996 – 11.57am

It happened like this; An arrow came out of nowhere and stuck firmly into the side of the building below them. They stared around, looking for the source, and found it – a dark shape in a window across the street. There was a strong wire attached to the arrow, and Patton got it before Markus did.

"Take off your pants," she demanded.

"What?"  
"Take off your pants. Your shirt is too thin."

The man was getting closer. He seemed to have run out of ammunition, although that probably wouldn't matter too much once he got close.

Markus did as he was told, and Patton wrapped his pants around the wire, handing both ends to him.

Markus' brain caught up. "Oh no. No. No. We are not doing this."

Patton climbed on his back anyway. There was no other option. Markus held his breath as he jumped off the side of the building, pants firmly in both hands.

They swung sideways as the pants took up the slack. It might have actually been exhilarating, even fun, if Markus hadn't been in complete agony the whole time. His injured hand threatened to give out the whole way across, and Markus wished he'd just sent Patton on her own.

He'd imagined smashing heroically though the glass on the other side, but the window was already opened the whole way out. They collapsed on the floor. Ignoring his throbbing hand, Markus went to the window and looked out.

The man-from-the-puce-volvo was silhouetted against the sun, standing on the edge, watching them. While Markus looked, the man walked away, and Markus realized it was only a matter of time before volvo-man was over here.

"We gotta go." From the man who'd shot the arrow.

"Yeah, I'd figured that out," Markus grumbled as they left the apartment. In the hall outside there was a staircase and an elevator.

"Well, which one this time? What's he going to least expect? What's our best tactical manoeuvre?" Markus was beginning to realize that no matter where they went, how clever they were, that man was going to follow them. And now it looked like they couldn't even kill him. And it was pissing Markus off.

He'd had two days of this now, two days of running, hiding. He couldn't imagine doing it for the rest of his life, and he really didn't want to have to find out.

They both gave him the same withering look and stepped into the elevator.

"Coming?" the new guy asked.

Markus got in.

* * *

Monday 15th October 2029 – 4.43pm

Erica had wandered for a while after the crowd in the barn had finally dispersed. She found herself near the graveyard wall. Her mother's body was still stretched out in front of it, but Erica paid her little attention. Her mother was dead, and that body was just a thing.

She looked at the wall, walked up and down it, examined faces she'd never seen before, and some that she knew very well. She recorded a bit, but she was too busy thinking to really pay attention to what she was doing.

How many pictures were on that wall? Thousands, definitely. It had gotten so big recently that they'd had to start expanding onto the walls nearby, and even onto the ceiling.

How big would it be this time tomorrow? How many bodies would there be in this hall?

* * *

Sunday 1st September 1996 – 4.25pm

"So, what the hell did you think you were doing?"

Markus had filled Jack – the new guy – in on their adventures of the last few days.

"Seriously, you got that Cecilia woman and those police officers killed. And all the people in the office building and the mall. And the waitress, and probably a whole bunch of others. If it wasn't for little Patton here, you'd have been dead in that hotel. Do you realize how many times she's saved your life? And she's, what, like eight?"

"Twelve. I think," Markus did not like being told off like this. It wasn't anything he hadn't told himself a hundred times.

They'd changed their clothes. Markus had gone from being looking like an escaped metal patient with bad dress sense to a fourteen year old with glasses, but he'd gotten to keep his back-pack from Cecilia's house. Patton looked about six – she'd even been given shoes with soles that flashed. She was not amused.

"You two, after today's antics, are probably at the top of someone's no-fly list. You're all over the news. They're looking for a college student and a twelve-year-old, not a nerdy teenager and his little kid sister. We've got to get you past security with no questions, or a whole lot more people will get killed." Jack explained.

He looked at his watch. "We should get going. Plane's leaving soon."

"Where are we going?" Markus asked.

"We're meeting up with Sarah in Panama."

Jack still hadn't given Markus any proper answers, and Markus was done.

"Who the fuck is Sarah? And why on earth is she in Panama? Where even is Panama? And why is volvo-guy trying to kill me? And why can't he die?"

Patton started to clear the table – Markus had had a massive cheeseburger meal, Patton had left her chicken nuggets completely untouched. Jack rescued his half-drunk cup of coffee as she whisked the tray away.

"Seriously, what is her deal?" he asked distractedly – he was examining their tickets.

"I don't have all the answers kid. Sarah is a bad-ass who is in Panama because of reactions like yours. No-one expects her to be there. She's got this kid, John. She treats him like the fucking Messiah. Says she's trying to prepare him, or something, but she won't say any more than that. And volvo-guy? Are you six?"

"What else am I supposed to call him?"

"I don't know. Sarah sent me here to keep you away from him and get you to her – don't know anything else... He can't die? What the hell's that about?"

Markus shrugged. "He's been hit by a car, shot a couple of times, completely fine."

"Huh."

* * *

Monday 15th October 2029 – 8.19pm

Erica was one of the few who had bothered to make the trek upstairs to greet the new arrivals. If she hadn't been making the documentary, she doubted she would have. What was the point? And anyway, what was going on downstairs was much more interesting.

The doors to the outside world opened, just a crack.

People started to pour in. And they just kept coming. More and more, one by one. Two hundred and eighty four, George had said – it looked like more.

As they came in, they sort of naturally divided themselves into two groups, and it was very clear which was which – those who had already been in the military, and those who'd been drafted over the last few days.

There were a lot fewer actual soldiers, but they looked a lot more organized than those from camp nineteen. Most of them had uniforms and guns, and, for the most part, they stood proudly. They were young, but they looked like seasoned warriors, and Erica had the slightest moment of hope, before she turned to look at the other group.

They were tired, bedraggled. They were in even worse condition than the new recruits from nineteen were. Most were old, and those that weren't had a scared nervous look about them, some sort of physical disability or were just too young – little more than children. They didn't even look like they met the fourteen year-old age requirement, and that was incredibly young – too young, to begin with.

But, people were people and troops were troops, and Erica was glad they were here. But did having more people fighting mean more people would die?

* * *

Sunday 1st September 1996 – 4.30pm

"This is going to be fun," Jack was leaning back against the railing, nonchalant.

The security queue wasn't very long, which was not a good thing. The security guard got to take his time, examine everything and everyone properly. They were halfway down it when something occurred to Markus.

"Shit, Jack. Shit."

Jack looked at Markus.

"Shit. Um. Shit." Markus did not know what to do.

He hissed under his breath at Jack - "the gun, Jack."

"What gun?"

"The one I have in my bag."

Jack's face dropped - he had a serious "oh crap" expression on, but he kept it together. "Bathroom, wipe it down, throw it in the bin."

There were now only two people ahead of them in the queue, but a large gang of teenagers on some sort of group trip had come in behind them.

"Sorry, so sorry," Jack grovelled conspicuously as they elbowed their way out. They were getting some odd looks.

Markus headed for the bathroom. He heard Jack say "that boy is an idiot," to Patton as he walked off. He couldn't believe he'd forgotten about the gun. If he hadn't remembered in time...

There was a couple of people in the bathroom, and Markus went into one of the stalls. As he waited for the room to empty, he got some toilet paper and started to wipe the gun down. The noises died off; when Markus opened the stall door, the bathroom was deserted.

He was about to drop the gun into the waste-paper bin when the door opened. Hurriedly, he buried it under some damp tissue paper and avoided the gaze of the small Asian boy who'd come in the door. He thought he'd gotten away with it as he made a big charade of washing his hands.

Back outside, they joined the security queue again. Jack and Markus went through the metal detector with no problems, but with Patton the machine beeped.

Markus' throat leapt into his mouth. Jack's words rang through his head - "We've got to get you past security with no questions, or a whole lot more people will get killed."

This was it, they were all going to die.

The security guard made Patton go through the machine again. It beeped again. Markus' anxiety level went through the roof. He was debating grabbing her and making a run for it as the security guard made Patton turn out her pockets. She'd been wearing a metal headband and she went back through. It beeped again.

Markus was literally stepping forward to pull her away, when the security guard checked her shoes – there was wiring inside them. The security guard was clearly pretty relieved, though not nearly as relieved as they were, and he after he'd scanned her shoes, he didn't make her go back through again.

"Just don't do anything else stupid," Jack hissed at them a few metres later. Patton and Markus looked at each other – the shoes had definitely been Jack's fault. Probably better not to argue though.

* * *

Monday 15th October 2029 – 11.57pm

They'd run out of space in the military bunks for the new arrivals, so most of them had been absorbed into the mart. Some sat separately, but most were chatting and laughing with the people from nineteen.

There was an air of celebration – if this was to be the last night on earth for so many, the least they could do was make it a good one.

Erica sat with a group of old men, playing cards.

"This reminds me of -," one of them began.

"Here he goes again!" another teased. "Hey, girl, you'll want to get out your camera for this." He was joking, but Erica started recording anyway.

There was something very sweet about these men. They'd fought together before Judgement Day, and for a long time after, before being discharged. But, they'd been called up again along with everyone else.

"That time, do you remember?" He was drunk, but they all were. This was their last goodbye. At least some of them wouldn't make it through tomorrow.

They laughed loudly.

"Oh, yeah, that time."

"That time was my favourite time."

"I think we should do that time all over again, don't you?"

"Shurrup, you know what I - I mean" he slurred.

Erica felt like she was intruding a little – these men had been together so long, fought together, lost friends together, been with each other through wives and kids, and illnesses and deaths. They were closer than family, and they deserved to say goodbye in peace. So she slipped silently away, and just heard "hey, where'd she go?" as she went out of earshot.

There was a mother nearby, holding her uncomfortable daughter's face in her hands, and staring at her proudly, tears streaming down her face. The girl was a little more than fifteen, Erica knew her a little. The mother pulled the unfortunate daughter into a tight hug, and whispered, just loud enough for the camera to pick up, "just come back, okay?"

She noticed Erica recording and raised her voice at her; "Do you mind?" She pulled the poor daughter away.

Erica moved on.

"Eight, nine, ten! Ready or not, here I come!"

Hide and seek had become a favourite new past-time for the kids since more corridors had been opened up. The little girl zoomed right by Erica, just missing her. The kids really had no idea what was going on. It was just another day, and for some reason they were being allowed stay up really late and do whatever they wanted.

She went into the hall. The same group as earlier didn't appear to have moved, although they were much drunker now. One of them was giving a speech about Connor's failures as a leader, and how they were all doomed. Erica didn't want to hear it, so she kept walking, kept recording.

There was a muffled din coming from the farmhouse, so Erica headed that way. She poked her head and the camera inside.

A bunch of people – she recognised them as some of the new recruits, were kneeling on the floor, sacks over their heads and a bucket of water in front of them. There were soldiers standing over them – mocking, shouting. Some sort of hazing ritual probably. Erica didn't wait to see what happened next.

Out in the corridor again, she bumped into Joan and George. They were kissing passionately, but jumped apart when they heard Erica coming.

"Oh, it's just you. Were you recording?" Joan asked. Erica nodded.

"Doesn't matter really now, I suppose. We're not supposed to be dating. Regulations." George explained. "But after what's going down tomorrow – well, I don't know how many of us will be around to care."

They walked off, and Erica didn't follow. They deserved a last night alone together too.

Down some more corridors, and Erica found herself outside the barn. Inside, the instructor she'd thought was an ass-hole was running drills with any of the new recruits who'd bothered to turn up. Erica hadn't been told about it, so she didn't think it was an official training session.

She stood, recording them on and off for about ten minutes, until they finished up.

"Any questions?" The instructor asked, and everyone's hand shot into the air. Another half-hour was spent answering everything from how to shoot a rifle to how long it would take to get from camp nineteen to the Skynet base, to what he thought their odds of survival were.

"Just remember your training and you'll get out of this okay," he finished.

Eventually, they dispersed, none looking comforted or prepared. Erica went up to the instructor while he was putting away the few guns he'd brought to practice with.

"You weren't ordered to do this, were you?"

The instructor shrugged. "I don't have anyone to say goodbye to, and they are so... not ready for what's coming. If I can put their minds at ease, or at least slightly less un-at-ease then..." he let the sentence trail off.

"Do you believe what you said a minute ago?"

He shook his head. "They were mostly ones and twos. I'd be very surprised if a single one of them comes back alive."


	12. Chapter 12

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 3.11am

The lights flickered back on in the mart. They'd only gone out twenty minutes ago, and most people still hadn't gone to bed – no-one had wanted the party to end, because if it ended, the end began.

Erica rolled out of her cot. Neil had slept in her mother's old bed, right beside Erica, and his eyes flickered open now.

"Get any sleep?" he asked blearily.

"No." Erica answered, searching her shoe.

"I think I did. Five minutes anyway." He showed no signs of getting up.

"3.12. THAT'S FOUR HOURS UNTIL THE MACHINES' COMMUNICATIONS GO DOWN. FOUR HOURS. LET'S MOVE!" Joan yelled across the room.

Nearby, Erica saw an old woman give Mr. Sansom a peck on the lips and say "I'll see you when you get back." That nearly broke Erica.

"Ugh," Neil said. "Do I have to go?"

Erica smiled, jamming the shoe on and tying up her laces.

"Uggggh," he whined, but sat up, and pulled a t-shirt over his head.

* * *

Sunday 1st September 1996 – 11.17pm

They'd left the city behind hours ago, and drove down, what Markus was very gratified to discover, the Pan-American Highway. It had been a very beautiful but very uneventful journey. They were climbing high into the mountains now, and even the occasional small towns had disappeared.

Jungle grew around and above, and the sky had turned pink, purple then black by the time they'd turned off the main road. They drew up outside a couple of low concrete buildings that blended into their surroundings so well in the dark that if Markus hadn't known they were there he would have missed them entirely.

As they came to a stop, three armed women came up to them. They waved their guns around threateningly but stopped when they saw Jack. He held up his hands jokingly. "Please, don't shoot!" The leader shot him a dirty look as he got out of the car, and he said "You know you love me really."

Markus wasn't sure that she did. "This is them?" the leader asked.

"Yurp. Barrel of laughs they are too," Jack responded as he walked away.

Markus wasn't really sure what to do next; he and Patton stood by the abandoned car as the others walked inside.

The leader-woman turned back, "Are you coming?"

She opened the door to one of the buildings and light flooded out. Markus hurried gratefully towards it, Patton following silently. They stepped into a low room, lit by a single bare bulb. There were a few chairs scattered around, and an impressive-looking computer in the corner. A young teenage boy with unnessecarily long hair sat working at it, and he waved at them without looking around.

The woman sat at one of the chairs and gestured for Markus and Patton to do the same. Markus hit his hand off the arm rest as he did so, and he winced.

"Let me see it," she said. Markus offered it up, and she examined it. "You should have gotten this seen to."

"You mean in between dodging bullets, running for my life and getting nearly everyone nearby killed?" Markus was not in the mood. "Are you Sarah?"

The woman nodded, but didn't say anything.

"And that's John?"

Both Sarah and the teenager looked at him. "How did you hear that name?" Sarah demanded.

"So he is John?"

Sarah nodded again.

"Jack said something. Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?" Markus just wanted to know. He wanted to know what and how and why. Mostly why.

"You're probably not going to believe me," Sarah went to a table nearby and pulled out a first aid kit. She waited to sit back down before she started to talk. "In the near future, we think you're going to become one of the leaders of the human resistance."

"Okay, great. What are we resisting?"

Sarah gave him another look, and he shut up.

"A computer programme called Skynet ends the world with a bunch of nukes, and the machines spend the next few decades trying to wipe out the human race."

"Robots? You're talking about robots. Robots from the future. You're telling me I'm being hunted by a killer robot from the future?"

Markus could not deal. This was ridiculous His first instinct had been right when he'd answered that phone, Sarah was crazy. His hand was in the hands of a crazy woman with guns. His life was in the hands of a crazy woman with guns.

Sarah ignored him and kept talking. "We're not really sure why they're after you, but everyone else they've come after has been high up in the resistance. John is going to lead the human race and destroy the machines."

Markus looked at him. John still refused to turn around from the computer, but he suddenly tensed up. That guy? Markus thought to himself. We're all screwed.

"But not until they've killed most of the human race?"

Sarah nodded. She finished wrapping his arm.

He'd started to add things up – the man-from-the-puce-volvo hadn't died when they'd hit him with the car, he hadn't died when those security guards shot him. He'd found them wherever they'd gone. Sarah had known where and when he'd be, how to help him, how to save him. Maybe killer robots from the future wasn't such a huge leap.

"How did you know about me?"

"We got a message a few weeks ago." Sarah cut the end of the bandage.

"Does that happen often?"

"No." She stuck the bandage down.

"So how did you get it, from who?"

Sarah started to gather all the first-aid-y things together.

"We don't know. We killed this terminator that had been looking for us for a while. John dug out his chip and plugged it in."

Markus was kind of following this.

"Few minutes later, this message came through, saying how to help you, when to call, where to send Patton, where to send Jack. Even the bow and arrow."

"How did you know it wasn't from them? The machines I mean."

"We didn't. But we had to risk it."

"Even though you don't know why they're after me?"

Sarah stood up and brought the first aid kit back to the table. "Yes."

"Um. Thanks."

"Why haven't you tried to prevent it?" Patton asked.

"Yeah. You know what's going to happen, surely you know how to stop it," this had been bothering Markus for a few minutes too.

"We've tried. Last year we thought we had, but -" she paused and looked over at John. "They kept coming back, kept coming for us, so we figure it didn't work."

"Say I believe you, say you're not completely nuts. What do we do now?" Markus asked, watching her face carefully.

"Well, right now, I'm going to bed." She stood up. "You need to sleep too."

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 3.22am

"EVERYONE, FIND YOUR TRACTORS!" Joan roared at them. They were inside, in a garage, still somewhere underground.

For some it was far too early in the morning for that kind of noise, but for most, it was still too late at night. About half of the new recruits were drunk out of their minds. It was a two and a half hour drive, and Erica really hoped they'd have sobered up by the time they got there.

The "tractors" were some really big military truck type things. They fit about forty people in the back, and everyone squished in. Someone closed the tarp that covered the back, and thumped loudly on the metal. The truck took off, one in a long line, stretching out in front and behind.

Erica was put up near the front, right behind the driver, so she could record both the road ahead, and the people sitting in the back.

She'd asked for Neil to be with her – this wasn't the time to be left alone, so he sat across from her. The road outside was too dark for anything to be seen, so she concentrated on the people in the back with her.

For a while they were silent, each thinking their own thoughts. Erica looked at them, and tried to figure out what they were thinking – some of their loved ones at home, surely, and some of what was coming.

Then, slowly, they began to talk to each other. There was no complaining any-more – everyone had accepted it, what would happen would happen, and there was nothing they could do about it at the moment. So, they laughed, they joked.

Eventually, someone produced a bottle of the spirit that someone – Erica had never been able to find out who – brewed at the camp. There was a hearty cheer, and they started to pass it around.

"To absent friends!" someone shouted. "We're glad you're not with us now!"

Everyone took a sip, and by the time it got to Erica, it was nearly gone. She'd debated taking a sip while it was going around. She figured if she did, it was one less drink that someone else had, and maybe they wouldn't get killed because of it. Maybe.

It burned her throat as it went down, and she spluttered a little, much to everyone's amusement. One of the actual soldiers had begun to say "Never had a -" when there was an explosion behind them.

The people at the back unclipped the tarp and raised it up. The tractor two back had exploded. The ones behind it were driving carefully around.

Another explosion, up ahead.

Erica whipped the camera around, and a couple of tractors ahead, another one had exploded. They watched as a missile dropped out of nowhere, and blew up the tractor right in front of them.

There was a blinding flash and a deafening bang. The driver swerved uncontrollably.

Their tractor skidded off the road, and ended up in a sort-of ditch. They were thrown forwards, then backwards, then to the side. People rolled and jumped and were flung out of their seats. Erica banged her head, hard, and didn't see any more.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 5.58am

Neil was shaking her awake. "You okay?"

Erica nodded roughly. The ground under her vibrated, and she realized she was in another tractor.

"They picked us up," Neil said. "We're nearly there. I didn't think you'd want to miss it."

Nearly there? Shit. Now that it was so close, Erica had this uncomfortable sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"How many did we loose?" she asked, holding her pounding head.

"About a quarter."

She looked at him. About a quarter meant nothing to her at the moment – her head was too sore to do any mental maths.

"We've got about seven hundred and sixty people left," he clarified.

Seven hundred and sixty? A little over a thousand had left the camp.

"Two thousand, two hundred," another voice piped up. "Two thousand, two hundred people left."

The human race was shrinking.

"Help me up," she said, and hands pulled her up off of the vibrating floor. As she stood, the tractor gave a lurch and stopped, and she nearly fell right back down again. The tarp lifted up, and Joan's head appeared. "We're here."

Everyone crowded out. And stopped, and stared. The sky unfolded out above them. It wasn't blue, like Erica had heard, it was grey and full of clouds. It was still quite dark, but everyone from nineteen, everyone who had never been outside before, couldn't help but look at every single little thing around them.

They were in sort of a valley, and grass rose up around their feet. There was a tree – Erica had never seen a tree, standing a little way above them. Connor was there, beside it, shouting to get their attention. Alison, as always, stoutly by his side.

This was the first time Erica had seen Alison since the attack. And Alison looked like shit. She had a black eye, a bunch of cuts and her metal still showed through on her skull. Erica felt horribly guilty, but she wasn't actually sure if she'd done anything wrong by cheering.

"You all know we have lost the element of surprise." Connor was saying, "But we have not lost hope that this mission will succeed. We can do this. We can save everyone."

Odd turn of phrase, Erica thought. They definitely couldn't save everyone. At this point, Erica would be surprised if they could save anyone.

"The Skynet base is about a twenty minute walk south,"

Erica didn't know how many people were in a fit state for a twenty minute walk – between the old people, the sick people, the drunks, and Erica's head wound, a twenty minute walk sounded a little far-fetched.

"It's in an old school, big building, so those of us going inside will have to spread out to find what we're looking for."

Some of the soldiers were passing out walkie-talkies.

"Stay in touch over your radios," Connor shouted. "We've only enough for about half of us, so if you haven't got one, pick someone who has and stick with them."

"Remember, the people back at the camp are listening in over the radio, so try and sound... optimistic."

Really? Erica thought. The idea that the people back at camp were listening in was a new one to her, and she didn't think she liked it. But then, they did deserve, as much as anyone else, to know what was going on.

She felt whoosy, and her legs gave out under her a little, but Neil caught her on one side. Mr. Sansom came up on the other, smiled wordlessly, and put her arm around his shoulders. Between Neil and Mr. Sansom they managed to carry two large guns, Erica's camera and support Erica herself.

"Once we get there, you know what to do," Connor was saying. This wasn't strictly true. Everyone had some vague idea of what their assignments were, but nothing specific enough to really be helpful.

"Are we ready?" Connor asked his subordinates around him. One by one they nodded that their groups were ready, Alison nodded last of all, and Connor said "Right, let's go."

It started to rain. Erica discovered she really didn't like rain. And they started to make their way to the Skynet base, a mismatched group of ill-prepared fighters.

Humanity's last hope.


	13. Chapter 13

Tuesday 16th October – 6.52am

Their twenty minute walk had taken forty, and they were way behind schedule when they got to the Skynet base. They'd had to walk the whole way around, through an abandoned town, to get to the front of the school and find enough cover to hide nearly eight hundred people.

Connor and the rest of the military leadership – including Joan – had snuck forwards for a better look. Connor turned around and gestured for Erica to follow them.

Surprised and pleased, she did, leaving everyone else cowering in an abandoned warehouse. She started to record. They stole quietly down alleys and ended up hiding in someone's kitchen looking out over the school. It didn't look like a school now – there were high mesh fences with barbed wire long the top, two tall watchtowers with search lights combing the ground outside.

The only remnants of the school ever being there were the words over the main door "Nathan B Forest High School" and a curiously well tended flower garden. There was a flurry of activity – machines patrolled constantly.

"Crap. They've guessed we're coming here," Connor cursed.

"It's not too late to pull out," Markus reasoned.

"No, we'll never get another chance like this. Markus, you're with me when we get inside, I need you to protect Erica."

"I know the plan John," said Markus, exasperated.

"Wait, me? What? Why?" Erica asked.

"You didn't tell her!" Joan exclaimed.

"No I didn't tell her. She didn't need to know." Connor wasn't even paying attention. He appeared to be counting the guards outside.

"The documentary," Joan said, "we're sending it to the past."

"How-" Erica began, but Sackhoff cut her off.

"It doesn't really matter how many guards there are John, you know that. All it takes is for one to see us, and they'll all be up our collective ass."

Connor nodded absently. Now he was staring at the flower garden. It seemed to make him uncomfortable somehow.

"Time travel exists, we've sent people back. There's tech inside that school that can get that documentary to before Judgement Day," Joan explained. "Now shut up, we don't have time for you to ask stupid questions."

Erica thought that was completely unfair. She hadn't asked any stupid questions. She'd barely even asked one.

"Everyone seen everything they need to?" Connor asked.

They all nodded.

"Okay. Alison?"

"They already know we're coming and they know how many from seeing the tractors, but they don't know why, or what we're after. They know the communications going down will hurt them, but the update is already scheduled, and it's more effort than it's worth to mess with it. They don't see a couple hundred humans as a threat," Alison said.

"They'd be right about that," Sackhoff added.

Alison continued; "We will take very heavy losses, I estimate up to sixty percent. I recommend we scrap the assault from the back, and concentrate on the distraction out front and the infiltration teams. We don't have enough people to successfully attack on three fronts any-more."

Connor's kind of an ass-hole, Erica thought in the middle of this. He'd told her she would have access to everything, all of the plan. She got why he hadn't told her, but she didn't get why he hadn't told her that he hadn't told her, after telling her that he would tell her.

"Okay, Joan, your team will co-ordinate with the teams attacking from the front. We wait here ten minutes for the infiltration teams to clear the school and then we follow. It doesn't matter how many people die if this works. They'll all have happy normal lives soon enough, and no-one will have ever heard of Skynet, or Judgement Day. Anyone got anything else to say?"

No-one spoke up.

"Right," Connor said, almost optimistically, "let's do this."

* * *

Tuesday 16th October – 7.01am

Erica was too horrified to do anything but point and shoot. Bodies littered the ground all around – at least a hundred. There were a few metal in there, but the vast, vast majority were human. The assault had launched five minutes ago. Erica had watched them, from her vantage point upstairs in the house, rush the gates and be cut down in swaths.

But from the comm-chatter it appeared that the infiltration teams had started to clear the building – to an extent; a lot of them had died in the process. Most of the comm-chatter was horrible – desperate pleas for help, people's last moments just before they died. But there was no-one left to help. This was it.

Erica thought of the people listening back at the camp, how impossibly helpless they must be feeling. How many had heard their loved ones die and not be able to do anything about it?

"Erica, we gotta go," Sackhoff yelled up the stairs.

Erica took a breath – the idea of entering that – she couldn't. But, somehow, she forced herself down the stairs. It was that look in Neil's eyes, just after Connor had told them about Alison's return. He'd told her he couldn't fight, and she'd been disgusted. After that, she had to step up herself. Back then she'd thought she wouldn't be afraid. Now she saw how naive that had been. But she could do this.

They were out the door, Connor, Sackhoff, Alison, Erica and two of the actual soldiers, scurrying along the main road, staying near the cover of the houses. But then they reached the end of the road, the end of the cover. The start of the bodies.

They picked their way through, staying low, avoiding the looks of the machine sentries. They couldn't afford to be seen by a single one, not until the link went down. If a machine saw Connor, or Sackhoff, or Alison, they'd be able to guess the plan.

Erica caught the faces of the dead, or the mostly dead. One or two grabbed at their ankles, pleading for help, but they had to leave them.

They got through the gates without any major difficulties.

"7.09," Alison warned them. They'd wanted to be inside the building by now.

They were passing the flower garden when Erica caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. She didn't have a gun, so she whipped around, pointing the camera at the source. She wasn't entirely sure why – she might get the face of the machine that ended her, but she didn't see what good it would do. But she wanted to anyway.

She was surprised to see it wasn't a machine at all. Neil sat cowering behind a low wall. Their eyes met, and Erica knew Neil well enough to recognise the look of utter shame in his eyes. She knew he wanted to help, wanted to fight, he just couldn't.

He'd had some – problems, a few years back. He hadn't been the same since, and Erica's heart went out to him now. But she had to move on.

* * *

Monday 2nd September 1996 – 4.07am

There were shots outside. Markus didn't care. He just wanted to roll over and go back to sleep, but the floor was hard and cold, and after a minute his survival instinct kicked in. Kind of.

Patton was already up, peering out a small nearby window. She put her finger to her lips and Markus nodded. He dragged himself up and joined her. The man-from-the-puce-volvo was out there. Terminator. He's a terminator, Markus corrected himself.

Several bodies were littered around him, some twitching or moving, but most were not. The door behind them opened, and Markus jumped, but it was just John. "Can't see out my window," he explained in a whisper.

They could see movement around the side of the building behind the terminator. It looked like a couple of people were getting ready to attack. John froze - "Mom!"

The terminator didn't see the people behind him and started to head for the building that Markus, John and Patton were in.

The group of humans, led by Sarah, ran out, shouting at each other and firing wildly at the terminator. The bullets bounced off.

"We're out of explosive rounds," John explained in a whisper.

"You're out? You didn't think it'd be handy to have some back-ups?" Markus said sarcastically – their lack of preparation could get them all killed.

"They're kinda hard to come by."

Patton shushed them. The terminator had turned and started to fire on his attackers. One by one they fell, injured or dead.

It was Sarah alone. John stared, transfixed. Patton started to look around the room, but there was nothing there that could help.

Sarah was shot down.

John leapt up, and ran from the room. Patton and Markus looked at each other, then followed helplessly behind.

John was out the front door and headed straight for the terminator, who whirled around and was just about to shoot, when Markus knocked John to the floor. He pulled John away to the side, but they could only watch as Patton was left to face the terminator alone.

There was something similar in the way they stood, the way they moved. Markus hadn't noticed it before. Patton had no weapons, no way of defending herself, no hope, but she wasn't afraid.

She never showed fear, she never laughed, never cried. She was only twelve, everything that had happened – she should have been a mess. And the way she'd taken charge – she knew things, she'd saved him so many times by just knowing what to do. How could a twelve year old know that?

Markus realized she was buying them time. He and John ran to Sarah, who was stretched out on the ground. She was tensed up in agony, but she wasn't dead.

She pushed the gun into John's hands and hissed "You know what to do."

John nodded and stood up, pointing the gun straight at the terminator's head. He shot, but just a half second too late. Patton crumpled to the floor, and then the terminator did, right after.

Markus ran to Patton's side, but John shouted, "No! I need your help!"

He was digging around in his pocket. Markus came up, and John commanded, "the gun! Now!" Markus didn't really see the point, but he pointed it as John began to cut into the terminator's head.

"One hundred and twenty seconds until he reboots. We've got to get his chip," John explained as he cut furiously. He was through to the skull, and was twisting out the chip as the terminator's hand started to twitch – he was coming back online. But the chip was out; they were safe.

After days of being hunted mercilessly, Markus didn't care. He didn't have eyes for anyone but Patton. He found himself beside her, without really knowing or caring how he'd gotten there.

There was blood everywhere, it was pumping out of her. Markus hugged her close and it got on his face, in his hair. His arm twinged painfully, but he couldn't have cared less at that moment.

Her eyes fluttered, and that was it. She had no immortal last words, Markus didn't have time to say goodbye, she was just gone.

It was too much. All those strangers, at the hotel, the apartment building, the gas station, the policemen, the waitress, the security guards, the people in the office, the people here, his mom, his dad, Felicity, Cecilia and now Patton. They had taken everything from him, everyone. Everyone Markus cared about, everyone he had ever, even remotely, loved was dead.

It was over.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 7.11am

There were two sentries at the door to the school. By the time their little group saw the machines, they were almost on top of them. But the machines hadn't seen them either. They fell to the ground and played dead while the two soldiers snuck up on the machines.

The soldiers were expendable, while everyone else in their group was not. One of the soldiers was shot point-blank in the head, but too late – they'd managed to take down the machines.

Inside the building, the bodies lessened. There was only one or two per corridor now, and there were more machine bits lying here and there – the people who'd been assigned to infiltrate the building were more experienced, better fighters than those who'd been cannon fodder outside.

"7.12, that's it," Connor hissed into his walkie-talkie "thank you everyone, fall back. We'll see you outside."

They'd had to turn the sound off the radios when they'd left the house, and Erica had no idea how many people were left to hear this message. A fraction of what had started the assault eighteen minutes ago.

They didn't even try to hide any more – they raced through the corridors. Erica began to get suspicious – this was too easy, where were all the machines? They'd run into a few, but they'd managed to subdue them easily enough.

It was hard to record now, they were moving too fast. Room after room went by, corner after corner, body after body. She had no idea what they were looking for, but Alison was leading, and she seemed to know where they were going. Up a flight of stairs, and then they were there.

It was a huge room, filled, top to bottom, with computer equipment. A whole bunch of boxes with switches and flashing lights, screens, wires, fans. It was freezing cold.

They spread out, looking for something. Erica didn't know what, so she crossed to the window and looked out – she found where the machines had gone.

They were mercilessly pursuing the last of the humans, who were fleeing helplessly. Erica tried to do a quick head count – less than two hundred, definitely. The machines were cutting them down in their dozens. They'd be very lucky if any made it out alive.

Her head was killing her. Adrenaline had kept her going up until this point, but now that they'd stopped, her head wound was catching up to her. Trying to ignore it, she turned back to the room.

They seemed to have found what they were looking for; a small silver-grey box. It looked so unimpressive; Erica wondered why hundreds of people had died to get them into this room.

They were pulling out cables furiously, when the screens started to flash. Everyone looked up, surprised. Words began to scroll across them:

"STOP YOURE KILLING ME"

"PLEASE IT HURTS"

"I DIDNT KILL ANY OF YOU"

This stopped Connor dead in his tracks. "Stop, everyone, stop, please."

He stood back and held his head in his hands. "Alison, find the time travel message thing, we're getting out of here."

"No! That is not the plan!" Sackhoff raged. Erica was on his side. Those people had not died for some long-shot time-travel nonsense. Taking out the communications was the mission.

"The flower garden," Connor whispered, almost to himself. "Did you see the flower garden?" to everyone. "Why would they do that?"

"It doesn't want to die. IT'S SCARED!"

He started to shout now. "IT'S SCARED! It didn't kill anyone."

"It's a machine John." This came from Alison. She'd stopped looking for the time-travel thing and walked over to him. "You have to do this. All of this, all of it, was so we could end the machines once and for all. You can do that now."

"You." Connor stroked her face softly. "You're one of them. You're telling me you don't feel? Don't feel anything?"

"No. Maybe. It's – different. I think. I can't explain. But it's not the same. It doesn't matter. I don't love you John. You have to kill it."

She looked into his eyes, but Erica could see Alison's were blank as ever. "You have to kill it. John."

The sound of his own name snapped him back into the moment.

"No," he shook his head. "NO! Get the tech, get out."

Sackhoff couldn't contain himself any longer. "No, John. No. Remember Patton? You met her, do you remember? She was just a kid. We were all just kids. They destroyed us. We have to destroy them."

He began to head for the box, but Alison held him back.

Markus began to struggle, to fight, claw, he begged, pleaded. "You're on my side," he almost sobbed. "You want it dead too."

"John says no," she explained, "then I say no."

The solider started towards the tech too, but one look from Alison stopped him. She could very easily kill everyone in the room if she wanted to, if John ordered her to, and they all knew it.

Erica didn't know what to do. She'd recorded it all, and now she spoke up.

"Connor; John," she started. She didn't know if calling him by his first name was cheeky, but at the moment she didn't care. She needed to get his attention.

"John. All of those people, hundreds and hundreds of people are out there, right now, dead, dying, bleeding on the ground, crying for their mothers, being hunted by the machines. All for you. For this. You have to kill it."

Then she realized what she'd said. Kill it, she'd said it too. Kill. How could you kill something that wasn't really alive?

"I'm sorry," Connor's face was devastated. He knew what he was doing, the consequences. "I'm sorry. If we do this, we are no better than them. If we wipe them out, like they're trying to do to us, then we are no better than them." He looked around the room.

"We are no better than them. Why should we survive and they die if we are no better than them?"

Erica could see that none of them agreed with him. This kind of philosophical debate was for when the war was long over and everyone was safe. But they were having it now, and even though none of them agreed with him, they would defer to his leadership. Like always. He was John Connor.

"Get the tech, get out," he repeated.


	14. Chapter 14

Monday 2nd September 1996 – 2.00pm

Nobody had slept.

Markus' back ached. He'd spent the day digging graves and carrying corpses – nine of them. He didn't know the names or the stories or the lives of eight of them. And he didn't really care.

There'd been six survivors – Jack, Sarah, John, Markus, a fairly scary old lady with a really big gun and a Russian accent, named Marita, and a wiry guy in his late twenties named Dave. Dave had a bullet in his shoulder. Sarah and Marita had taken him off into one of the buildings to sort him out. Every so often a shout or moan would be heard from inside.

Sarah had preformed first-aid on herself. As far as Markus could tell, she'd basically put a compression bandage on it and taken a bunch of painkillers. She hadn't even tried to take the bullet out. This really did not seem like a good idea, but when he tried to bring it up, she'd completely ignored him.

John had taken the man-from-the-puce-volvo's chip into the room with the computer and was trying to get data from it – or something. He'd used a lot of big words, and Markus wasn't too good at tech speak.

That left Jack and Markus to deal with the bodies. They'd dug the graves a little way off, under the shade of some big trees. If you turned your back on the ugly concrete buildings then it was kind of – peaceful.

Now that the sun had come up, there was this amazing view down into the valley. The whole landscape was pretty deserted – acres and acres of forest and trees, with a long snaking line that indicated the road.

Most of the bodies were lying out in a neat row beside the graves, but Markus hadn't been able to look at or even think about Patton's. Jack hadn't pushed the issue, so she was still crumpled up where she'd fallen. But it was time.

Markus looked down at her. And then he looked away. He just – couldn't. He grabbed one of her ankles with his good hand, and Jack got her wrists, and they sort of shuffled sideways, dragging her along the ground in the way they'd gotten so good at over the course of the morning.

One by one, they tossed the bodies into their graves. Jack had known all of them personally, and it wasn't easy for him either. Patton was left until last, and they lowered her body slowly. It made a thud when it hit the ground, and Markus nearly threw up. Her neck was bent at an odd angle from the drop and she was still covered in blood.

There was that thing you always heard about dead people – they looked like they could be asleep. Patton did not. Patton looked very, completely, utterly, tragically, dead.

When the bodies were in the ground, Jack called everyone outside.

They stood sombrely around the edges of the open graves. Dave lent on Marita for support. No-one really knew what to do. They couldn't give them back any of the respect they'd lost – their families would never know what had happened, how they died to protect everyone else. Most of them, Markus had discovered, hadn't even known the full story – the machines, the future, none of it. They didn't know why they were fighting, only that they should.

After a few minutes of silence, Sarah walked away. Marita and Dave followed straight after, and John shrugged helplessly at Markus, before leaving too. And that was all they got in the way of a funeral, or a wake.

Jack and Markus began to fill in the graves.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 7.19am

They were back outside the school, near the gates, when someone grabbed Erica's foot. She was still recording, and turned the camera to see a face, half buried under a machine body.

"Please," they croaked. Erica bent down to help. It was Joan.

"John, Sackhoff, someone, help!" she shouted, but they were a little way off, and didn't hear. There were gunshots in the distance.

"It's okay," Joan murmured, "it's okay. I'm going to die. Just tell George -"

A machine loomed in the distance. It turned. It saw Erica.

"I'm sorry," Erica managed to get out, before she turned and fled. She didn't hear the message.

She passed the flower garden. Neil was still there, he hadn't moved.

She shouted back at him; "Come on!"

She didn't hang around to see if he listened.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October – 8.37am

The tractor was half empty and silent. They'd made it back to the abandoned vehicles – just about. They'd lost some, but they'd gained more, so there were a few stragglers in the back.

All the core group had made it back – Connor, Sackhoff, Alison, Erica and the solider whose name Erica still didn't know. She didn't ask. She didn't really want to know.

They'd only lost one member - she wondered if any of the other squads had been so lucky. She doubted it.

The way back to the tractors had been littered with bodies too, machine and human, but a lot more human. It looked like two or three of the tractors had left before them, at best a hundred and twenty people, probably a lot less – but still, better than Erica had expected after seeing the carnage left in their wake. And all for nothing. They'd all died for absolutely no reason.

She doubted whether any more tractors would leave after them; they hadn't seen anyone else left alive, so she did some counting – eighty. Say eighty people had escaped before them, plus those in their truck, that made ninety one. Add in those left in the various camps. About one thousand, four hundred and fifty, total. A thousand less than this time yesterday.

Two fifths of the human race had died within the space of half an hour. For nothing.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 10.24am

In the hall outside the mart, beside the graveyard wall, a group of people were singing the funeral song. On, and on, and on. Erica passed them without stopping. She couldn't stop, or she'd fall apart.

She walked into the mart, and her heart broke. It was silent, completely, apart from one woman wailing and crying. It was the mother who'd told her daughter to be sure she came home last night. There were a couple of people around her, trying to comfort her, but you could tell everyone else just wanted her to shut up.

The place was almost empty, Erica had never seen it like this. Usually it was a hive of activity, with hundreds of people coming and going all the time, but now – there were maybe a hundred and fifty people left in the huge room. It looked so sparse.

No-one knew what to do, so they were sitting or standing, alone or in clumps, doing nothing. Erica started to record, simply because she didn't know what else to do. She was covered in blood and dirt, and her head hurt, and she was really tired, but none of those things really seemed to matter.

After a while, Erica began to feel she was intruding on people's grief, and she switched the camera off.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 10.35am

Erica stood in the middle of the bathroom, right over the drain, stark naked. Some of the older people clung to the idea of privacy, but for most, nudity was nothing special.

She had a bucket of cold water on the floor – they hadn't been able to heat it for years, and was sponging herself down.

Usually while she was doing this a couple of people would come through, but this time there was only one; an old man came up to her – a friend of her mother's and said "thank you for everything you did today," and then left.

There was a lump the size of a tennis ball in Erica's throat and it took everything she had not to burst into tears. She had to be strong – for now. There would be time to fall apart later. Blood and dirt and water mixed together and swirled down the drain.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 10.42am

Erica was back in the farmhouse. It was almost empty for once – just her, Sackhoff and George. The corridors on her way here had been pretty empty too, she'd only gone past one or two people.

George had leapt up and given her a hug when she came in, but Erica hadn't been able to look her in the eye. She kept seeing Joan's face, hearing her last words, trying to guess the message she'd been trying to send – surely something about loving George? Probably?

Sackhoff was saying "I put him in his room with that thing. I'll deal with them in a few minutes while I have time. How many made it back?"

"Sixty-seven," George said. "Including you two. Out of a thousand and sixty-two."

Erica couldn't absorb that information. It meant nothing to her.

Sackhoff nodded, and started to leave, but Erica stopped him. "The tech, the documentary, are we going to try to send it?"

He looked at her like she was completely nuts.

"There's something else you should know," George said, "we received this over the radio an hour ago." She handed him a piece of paper and, as he read it, his face paled.

"And then this fifteen minutes ago." She handed him another. "And this four minutes after that." She handed him a third.

"Is this right?," he asked.

"As far as we can tell," George nodded.

Sackhoff looked crushed. He looked around the room desperately, like he was looking for hope. He found none, and walked out the door. Erica had never seen him look like that – so... defeated. She leaned over George's shoulder to try and see the pieces of paper, but the camera couldn't get a good look.

"What is it?" she asked.

"The machines have started reprisals," George said. "Camps three and forty-seven have been destroyed, and ninety-six have a whole butt-load of machines on the way, and they've about twenty soldiers to defend a hundred people. It doesn't look good."

Three and forty-seven were the biggest camps they'd had left, since camp nineteen had lost so many in the Final Battle.. "How many people?" Erica asked.

"Last count, six hundred and ninety eight humans left."

Suddenly, calling it the Final Battle didn't seem so ridiculous.

* * *

Monday 2nd September 1996 – 9.04pm

"Oh! Oh! Oh! I get it! I've got it! Mom!" John's shout was loud and close enough to Markus' ear that he winced out of his grief-laden stupor.

Sarah's head appeared around the door into the next room. "What?"

"Come look!"

Marita and Dave had been getting together some food. They dropped it and Jack came in from outside. Everyone crowded around the computer. As far as Markus could tell, it was a lot of very complicated lines of code.

"I hacked in, wasn't that hard actually, just a couple-" John began.

"We don't need the play-by-play," Jack commented.

"Right, well, I got in. It got a transmission a few minutes ago."

John did some clicking, and the screen changed.

It was a video. There were noises in the background – gunshots, explosions, screaming. A girl's face appeared, but behind her was calm. Whatever was happening was nearby, but not in the room.

"I don't have a lot of time. Whoever gets this message, whoever Sackhoff told me to send it to -" Everyone looked at Markus. He shrugged – he was in the dark as much as the rest of them.

"You have to get it out there, people have to see. It's the only way to stop all this." She indicated around her. "We've sent back as much as we could, records, reports."

Markus was really confused – was she saying she was from the future?

"I'm explaining this badly. It's 2029. The human race is currently being wiped out in the hallway next to this room. We made a documentary over the last few days, you have to get it shown back then, in 1996."

There was an explosion somewhere behind her, and she glanced around nervously. "Judgement Day is coming. Soon. You can stop it."

The screen went blank.

They were all stunned.

"It's all here," John said. "Five hours of footage, couple of gigs of text files, couple more of pictures and audio." He looked at Sarah. "What do we do mom?"

She was debating internally, Markus could tell, but then she said "Delete it."

This sent out a bigger shock-wave than the video had. "But-" "What?" "We have to-"

"We don't have to do anything. Judgement Day is coming. There is nothing we can do about that." She looked them all in the eyes, one by one. "Nothing. This will just get everyone in this room killed faster." She left.

John turned back to the computer. "Don't delete it," Jack said. "We'll convince her."

John nodded, "I was just going to see what else we got." He started skimming through files, opening them, reading them.

"You said there was video?" Markus asked.

"Yeah, five hours, four minutes and thirty seven seconds."

"Play it."

"Hang on a second," Jack left the room. He came back a minute later with a reluctant Sarah. "It can't hurt to watch it," he said.

They sat or stood around the room, and watched how the world ended.


	15. Chapter 15

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 10.57am

The whole camp had gathered in the barn. It was so – empty. A fifth of what it had been yesterday. Connor knelt on the stage, hands bound behind his back. Erica had sort of a wide shot of the whole thing. She didn't want to record anything any more – she wasn't sure why she was doing it, but she definitely didn't want to see anyone's face in close up – everyone's emotions were too real for that.

Mr. Sansom stood to the side, while Sackhoff was talking.

"The actions of John Connor over the last few weeks have lead directly to the deaths of thousands. His plan for the Final Battle cost the lives of nearly a thousand men and women, while over nine hundred more have died in reprisals from the machines since. As of this moment, camps three, ninety-six and forty-seven have fallen, leaving the sum total of the human race at five-hundred and seventy-eight."

"A few months ago, that number was nearly ten thousand. Not since Judgement Day has the human race lost such a high percentage of it's people in such a short space of time. Connor has allowed his feelings for this -"

Alison was walked through the door. She was calm as ever, but Connor started to struggle a little when he saw her. Two soldiers brought her up on to the stage.

"This Thing to cloud his judgement. And now it is time for them both to pay." Sackhoff nodded to the soldiers escorting Alison, and they forced her onto her knees. The flap of skin on her skull that led to her chip had never been closed properly. They pulled it back.

She looked at Connor as they did so, and he started whispering to her. Erica couldn't make out the words, but they seemed to be words of comfort. Alison nodded a little, right as they pulled out her chip.

She slumped to the ground, and the room erupted into cheers. Erica's head spun from the noise – she was still suffering the effects of that bang on the head, and she was pretty sure she had a concussion of some sort. But she still didn't care.

Alison, lying hunched over on the ground, was so peaceful. She did look like she could have been asleep – if it weren't for the cuts and bruises and her black eye, the little bits of metal showing through her skin, and the fact that the machines didn't sleep, Erica might have said she was.

Connor was staring forward, but his emotions played all over his face. Sackhoff silenced the crowd, and held up Alison's chip with his good hand.

"This," he said, looking at it, "this has destroyed the human race." He threw the chip on the floor, pulled out his gun and shot it. It exploded into tiny metallic pieces.

Connor tried to jump up, to do something, but too late. The soldiers around him forced him to stay on his knees. His face – Erica had never seen anything like it, pain, rage, betrayal, guilt – it was all there, but there was something more, something worse, something harder, something primal.

Mr. Sansom stepped forward and pushed Sackhoff gently aside. "The question of John Connor's guilt or innocence in this matter has been raised. You have two hours to deliberate. We will re-convene here at 1pm to vote."

And they all exited the stage in a sort of procession; Mr. Sansom, two soldiers, Connor, two more soldiers, and finally Sackhoff. They were, Erica knew, all that was left of the original military of camp nineteen.

Alison's body was left, abandoned on the stage.

* * *

Tuesday 3rd September – 2.34am

It was pretty late when they finished watching. Sarah didn't said a word, just went straight to bed. The others were reluctant to discuss anything and left soon after.

Markus went to his new bedroom – one that had been left by a guy who'd died last night. He looked around – it was sparse, a mattress, a blanket, a pillow, blank concrete walls.

He lay down uncomfortably. It was weird, just taking someone's place like this. Like the guy hadn't existed. Or, like he was replaceable. Markus began to count again. Twenty-four definite, thirteen maybe.

He rolled over – these numbers were too big. Any number would have been too big. Why the hell should thirty seven people be dead or seriously injured just for him? And there were probably more – in the office, and who knows how many when the man-from-the-puce-volvo had been following on his own.

Markus couldn't get comfortable. His hand slid up under the pillow, and hit a bit of paper. He pulled it out, then got up to turn on the light.

His heart nearly came out of his mouth, he wanted to throw up. It was a photo of a family – a man, a woman, a baby.

The man was dead because of Markus. That child didn't have a dad because of Markus. Markus' family was dead because of Markus. Dozens of people were dead because of Markus, and they all had families, parents, husbands, wives, siblings, children.

Markus couldn't stay in this room any-more.

* * *

Tuesday 3rd September – 10.01am

Markus got up. The concrete floor was even harder and more uncomfortable than it had been the night before. He was surprised how easily he'd gotten off to sleep – he had so much to think about. Sleep had been a mercy.

Outside, John was sitting on the ground, back against the wall. He was letting the sunshine fall on his face, and when Markus' shadow got in the way as he passed, John jerked back into the real world. Markus sat next to him.

"It's weird, isn't it?" John said.

"Yeah," Markus responded.

"John Connor! Leader of the Resistance! Saviour of Humanity!" John sounded seriously bitter. "It's all crap."

There wasn't much need to say any-more than that. Markus had watched himself try to wrest power away from John, and John had seen himself lead humanity to destruction and then end the world.

They sat there for a while – Markus wasn't sure how long, then Jack and Dave came out to join them. They stood nearby, smoking the first cigarette of the morning.

"Markus, they're still looking for you, you know? Big manhunt and everything. Oh, and Sansom won," Dave announced between puffs.

"Oh yeah?" Markus said. "I always liked him."

"Me too," John chimed in.

Marita bumbled out the door, saying in her thick accent, "he's very good looking."

The four boys burst into gales of laughter.

A minute later, Sarah came out. They were still rolling around on the floor, laughing about something else. When they saw her, the laughter suddenly dried up.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay? Really?" John was tentatively excited, like a child who'd been given a puppy but was afraid it'd be taken away at any moment.

She nodded gravely. She knew, even if John didn't, that doing this, getting the documentary out there, would be difficult. And probably dangerous.

Markus watched John's face. There was this slow dawning realization. Markus didn't get it at first, but he began to piece all the things together that he knew about John. This documentary meant, if it worked, that John wasn't doomed to lead humanity after the apocalypse.

His entire life, John had had a destiny. Last night he'd discovered what that destiny was. This documentary meant that none of that had to happen. This documentary meant John Connor could have a life.

This documentary meant John Connor could save humanity. And the world didn't even have to end first.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 11.33am

Erica was on her way back from the doctor – he confirmed the concussion and given her a bunch of pain meds. As he'd said, usually they'd be on conservation measures with the medication, but they were all going to die in a matter of days, so who cares? Pain meds for everyone!

There was music up ahead – singing. The funeral song. She reached the graveyard wall – the group was still there. As far as she could tell, some had left, but even more had joined in and the choir was even bigger than ever. She went back into the mart to get her camera – she actually wanted to record this.

There was a crowd around Neil's bed. Her heart stopped. No.

No.

She shrunk backwards from them. She couldn't. Not again. Not today. But she gathered herself. Death, by now, was to be expected. They were all living on borrowed time. They noticed her as she got near, and stepped back to let her through.

His face -

Her cheeks were too warm, her hands shook. Without knowing what was happening, she turned around and retched. Again, and again, but she'd had so little in her stomach that after the first time, nothing came up. It could have been the concussion, or the medication, she didn't know, but it didn't matter.

She stumbled backwards, and fell over. She sat on the floor, her head resting against the edge of his cot, and everyone walked away around her, until she was alone with him.

She couldn't look at his head, but her camera was in his hands. Had he-?

She prised it out of his grasp – his hands were still warm. She hadn't been expecting that, she wanted to retch again, but stopped herself.

She stopped at her bed, then she stumbled down corridors until she found what she was looking for. She knocked.

There were no guards, no security. Probably not enough people left, and anyway, where could he go?

John Connor opened the door.

She held up her hands and offered the contents to him – camera, tape deck and all the footage she'd recorded. She couldn't speak, but he seemed to get the message. He stepped back and let her in.

* * *

Tuesday 3rd September 1996 – 11.12am

They were sitting around inside the darkened room. Dave had passed out sandwiches, and they were munching quietly.

"Plan?" Jack asked, mind still mostly on food.

"I need a few days to sort through everything. But how do we get it out there? I could put it on the Web, but I don't know if enough people will see it," John sounded already defeated – the initial high had worn off, and he was left with the pragmatic reality that his mother had foreseen.

"Look through it. We can figure out what to do with it later. Three days?" Sarah said. She looked at John.

"Three days."

* * *

Tuesday 3rd September 1996 – 6.57pm

They'd dug another pit – Markus would be perfectly happy if he never saw a shovel again. The terminator's body was much heavier than any of the others, and Jack and Markus were forced to grab an ankle each and drag it across the ground. Markus was still had to do everything one handed, but he'd gotten better at that.

Dave shouted unhelpful abuse as they did so; "Hey, watch out, I think there's a pebble coming up there. Dude, you're going about it all wrong."

"You could help if we're so bad," Markus panted.

Dave pointed at his shoulder. "Just can't do it I'm afraid," he grinned.

Jack and Markus rolled the body into the pit, and fell to the ground in sheer exhaustion.

"Dave? Hey, Dave?" Jack wheedled, "sack of thermite in the boot. Get it for me?"

"Magic word?" Dave asked.

"Hurry the fuck up."

"That'll do," Dave called over his injured shoulder as he headed for the car.

He returned, and they scattered the thermite over the body. Jack pulled out a box of matches, and started to light one, but Dave stopped him. "No good, it won't catch light. We need a flare."

"Okay, where are the flares?" Markus asked.

"In the boot," Dave replied.

Jack and Markus looked at each other. Then they looked at Dave. They groaned simultaneously.

Markus went to get one and when he got back, Dave and Jack were deep in discussion.

"No, I think I should do it. Have you ever lit a flare before?" Dave was saying.

"No," Jack conceded, "but I'm older than you."

He held out his hand for the flare, but Markus grinned, pulled the cap off and lit it himself. He dropped it into the pit and the body burst into flames to the sound of loud complaints from Jack and Dave.

They brought out some beer and chairs, and sat around joking and talking as the sun set, looking out over the valley and the jungle to the mountains beyond..

The skin had sort of melted and fried off the terminator skeleton.

"Holy shit!" Markus exclaimed, looking at the others. "This shit's actually real. Robots from the future are trying to kill me."

Jack was just as amazed, but Dave shrugged like it was nothing.

Gradually, Marita, John, and finally Sarah, joined them.

There was a moment – Markus was never sure what to expect from Sarah.

"Aha! There she is!" Jack was somewhere approaching drunk, and stood up to give Sarah his chair. She sat down, looked around and demanded, "Beer?!"

They roared with laughter – they were all a little tipsy, and Dave reached down to hand her one. "Um," he said. "They're all gone."

Markus leaned over and gave her the rest of his. He didn't need any more, he'd learned his lesson. She didn't thank him, but she nodded. It meant something – it meant Markus was one of them now. He had a place. After everything, he had a place.

He looked around. After the horror and fear and tragedy of the last few days, he hadn't thought that he'd ever feel something even close to contentment again. It was far from perfect. He was far from perfect, and he'd never be the same, never be so innocent, naive, ever again. But, for the moment, he was safe and he was with good people.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 11.46am

They'd loaded the last ten minutes onto the computer. There'd been flashes, frames popping up on the screen as the video transferred. Erica was sure she didn't want to see it, but somehow she had to. This message was for her.

They'd fast forwarded through the last things Erica had recorded. It was loaded now. John looked to her for confirmation, and she nodded. He pressed play.

Neil sat, alone. Erica didn't know where – it wasn't the mart, there didn't seem to be anyone around, but it was too dark to identify it. Didn't matter anyway.

"Um..." he began. "I don't know what to say." He looked so helpless.

"It's because of the toothpaste." He smiled. Erica giggled despite herself, despite knowing what was going to happen.

"No, it's not." He looked at the screen, deadly serious again.

"I can't sit here and wait for them to come," he began, and then stopped.

"No, that's not true either. I've wanted-" his voice cracked a little and he cleared his throat. "I've wanted to do this for so," he paused, and started again. "I've wanted to do this for so long. And now I can."

He stood up. Erica stopped breathing. The gunshot made her jump, even though she'd been expecting it. His body slumped to the ground, out of sight. There were thirty seconds of blank air, until someone ran into the room.

"Oh. Oh. Help?!" the person began – Erica couldn't see who it was, but they were talking mostly to themselves, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

"HELP!" The shout was as expected, as sudden and as devastating as the gunshot had been. They bent down, over the body, but there was nothing to do. Someone else came into the room and the camera shook around a bit and then went blank.

Erica didn't cry. She didn't scream, or do anything really. She just stood there. She didn't think. She couldn't. She wasn't sure how long, but eventually John moved, just a little – he shifted back in his seat.

She looked at him. "Thank you."

And then – black.


	16. Chapter 16

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 12.53pm

There was a knocking on the door. George poked her head in. She looked surprised to see Erica waking up in Connor's bed, but didn't question it. Today was the sort of day when unusual things happened.

She spoke to John; "it's time."

Erica tried to stand, to go with them, but they both hushed her back down. Connor smiled - "I'll be fine. Get some rest."

This was exactly what Erica had wanted to hear, she just hadn't known it. So she nodded uneasily, and lay back down.

After being alone a few minutes, she sat up. She loaded the first tape into the tape deck, and set it to start capturing the video. She loaded a new tape into the camera – well actually, none of her tapes were new, she was recording over all the old nonsense she'd recorded over the years. But it was a tape that had no documentary footage on it yet.

She was playing around with settings when John came in, half an hour later. She immediately began to record.

"Well?" she asked.

"Guilty," he pronounced, looking remarkably un-upset. Seeing the look on her face, he began to clarify, "I am guilty. I am responsible for the deaths of all of those people..." he trailed off.

But then he smiled again. "This will make them feel better, executing me. We're all going to die now anyway, I'm just going to do it a few hours before everyone else. Call me a trend-setter."

He was brushing it off, Erica could see. She didn't think it was the execution that was bothering him, but rather what he was being executed for – for ending the human race, essentially. She had no idea how someone could possibly deal with that, but she didn't think he was – he was pushing it down, getting on with it.

He stopped and sized her up. There was more, she knew, and he didn't think she could handle it.

"Just tell me."

"Camps thirty-four and twenty-one have been destroyed. It's just us now. Two-hundred and twenty-six – twenty-five people."

He said this almost casually, like if he didn't make a big deal about it, it wouldn't be a big deal. And it sort of worked.

The tape was ninety minutes long, and still capturing. There were two more, plus the one she'd just started.

"Can I see the footage?" he asked.

"Yeah," Erica said, and began to play the first file.

* * *

Friday 6th September 1996 – 9.07am

Everyone else was already there –Markus wished they would have woken him. They were deep in discussion.

"I finished sorting through them last night – there's so much stuff, not just reports and things. People sent back stories, novels and poetry and drawings. Records of births, deaths, marriages. A couple of people recorded audio messages to themselves or their families. There's a whole bunch of photos too," John was saying. "And – I haven't read it all yet, but there's a diary. Of everything – before Judgement Day and after."

They were all watching Sarah. "Okay," she said. "Put it all online."

"All of it?"

"Are you sure?"

She dismissed their unspoken objections. "We don't have the right to decide what people should and shouldn't see. Those people trusted us to get their story out there, to stop it happening all over again. We have to put it all up."

This was such a one-eighty from her opinion a few nights ago. Markus didn't have to wonder what had changed her mind – the documentary had been so powerful and they'd all seen bits and pieces of the other stuff that had been sent back. It was heart-breaking, devastating.

One woman had recorded a message to her teenage self – the girl had been depressed and thinking about suicide. The future woman had talked about how her family had helped her overcome it, how she'd been doing so much better. And then, Judgement Day. The woman had basically told her teenage self to go head and do it, they'd both be better off.

A father had told his wife who, in 1996, was pregnant, to get an abortion. It had hurt him too much to loose first his daughter, then his wife.

A sister had written to her brother and told him to get out of the army, then he'd have a chance. And it went on and on. Hundreds of messages from loved ones, warning them of how bad it was going to get. Very few told whoever the message was for to be strong, that it would be okay, because it wouldn't be. They were all going to lead short, brutally painful lives, and lose almost everyone they loved.

"Hold on, who says you get to decide?" Dave demanded. "We need to think about this. This could change everything."

"That's the point. If we don't change everything, it's all going to happen all over again. We have to change everything to stop it," John argued.

"Vote! Can we have a vote?" Dave proposed to Sarah.

Everyone immediately deferred to Sarah – and it was obvious why; she was just a leader. She knew what to do, how to handle things. If John was like that in the future, Markus thought, it was no wonder people followed him so blindly.

Sarah agreed to the vote.

Markus didn't know if it was such a good idea to release it all though. Stuff like that – it could cause panic. But he could see Sarah's argument too, it wasn't up to them to decide.

There'd been an interview with older-Markus in the documentary, but there was no message from himself to himself in the rest. Markus didn't know why he hadn't left one, but he knew if there had been one, he'd be pretty pissed if someone had hidden it from him.

So, despite his reservations, when Dave said "hands up if you think we should put it online," Markus raised his injured left hand above his head. So did Marita, Jack, Sarah and John. Dave was outnumbered.

"So, what do we do with the documentary?" Markus spoke up.

"TV. We put it on television," this was Marita. Markus immediately dismissed it as ridiculous.

Sarah re-adjusted in her seat, winced, and then began to nod slowly. "We put it on television."

"We do?" Jack asked sceptically.

"Yeah. Just think about it," John said. "It's kinda brilliant. There's no denying the footage, and even if people think it's an elaborate hoax, they'll want to see it. What TV station wouldn't want to air that? Plus, if we get it on TV, it's got a whole bunch more credibility than something that people just stumble upon on the web."

"Okay, how? Does anyone here have any TV connections? How about phone numbers? Email addresses? And even if we do get in contact with someone, who'd believe a bunch of crazy survivalists living on the boarder between Panama and Colombia?"

Jack was right, Markus thought. Without seeing the footage, no-one would believe them. And if no-one believed them, no-one would watch the footage. They were stuck.

But Sarah smiled. "We take it to them. We don't give them a choice."

"I'll start working on putting things online. There's a lot of data. It'll take a while, and I'll have to make a web-page or something to put it on," John said pointedly. No-one got the point.

"I'm busy. Get out."

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 1.37pm

Erica barged into the farmhouse. She was sick of being careful and polite and unobtrusive. But she was recording.

George, Sackhoff, Mr. Sansom and the four soldiers were in there. The last that remained of any military or government.

As she entered, Sackhoff had been saying "I just don't think there's anything else we can do." And Erica smiled.

"There is something we can do. We can fix it." She'd just watched the whole of the first tape with John. It was good. It could convince people, they just had to give them a chance to see it.

"We send the documentary back."

Sackhoff groaned, "it's not going to work-" he began, but seeing that everyone else was listening, he gave it up.

"But not just that, we send military reports, history, messages and photos from the people in the mart. Everything we have." Erica was impassioned. She knew this would work. "Just give me that box thing, me and John can figure the rest out."

"Even if, somehow, by magic, you manage to get that thing working, no-one's going to believe it. People before Judgement Day, they won't understand. You're too young to get it, but," Sackhoff looked to Mr. Sansom for help, but Mr. Sansom shot him down.

"What's the harm in trying? Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it will give the people here hope."

George began to nod too. "I'll help too,"she said. "I'll get the stuff together from the mart, scan it, whatever."

Sackhoff looked around the room – even the silent, nameless, soldiers seemed to agree.

"Alright," he said. "But Connor's execution stands. He has until six."

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 3.31pm

"Mr. Sansom," Erica began.

"That's me."

"You were president during Judgement Day?"

"Yes."

"What was that like?" Erica could not imagine it – not Mr. Sansom being president, or what it must have been like, being president on Judgement Day.

"We didn't have a clue," Mr. Sansom began. "The missiles started coming down, and we thought it was North Korea, or Al-Qaeda maybe, or one one of a whole bunch of others. We told people to stay in their homes, not to panic." He stopped talking.

"And..." Erica prompted.

"And then there were the nukes. City after city levelled. Within hours, all the major cities in America, plus most of the others across the world, were gone."

"How did you survive?"

"I happened to be on Air Force One at the time, flying back from a meeting with the Irish Taoiseach." He saw that none of that made any sense to Erica, and laughed.

"Air Force One was this massive, really cool plane that was used to fly me about. A Taoiseach was like the Prime Minister of Ireland. Sort of. Anyway, they flew me here, and I've been here pretty much ever since."

"Where is here?" Erica asked. "I mean, what was it before? A military base, right?"

"Cheyenne Mountain. NORAD."

"That's a military base, right?"

At this, Mr. Sansom laughed outright. "Yeah."

"So why is everything farm related?"

This threw Mr. Sansom a little. "Farm related?"

"Yeah, the way we've named things. The farmhouse, the barn, the mart, the feild... Why?"

Mr. Sansom shrugged. He didn't know either.

* * *

Friday 6th September 1996 – 4.09pm

It had been a long and boring day. There was nothing to do, beyond watch over John's shoulder while he worked, and John really hated that. So, Jack, Markus and Dave had taken to whittling grave markers for the dead.

They were sitting out in the sun. Marita was sitting nearby reading "The Idiot" in its original Russian. Sarah was off on her own as usual. No-one was ever quite sure where she went, or what she did, or when she'd be back. Markus really hoped she was getting her bullet wound seen to – he couldn't imagine getting shot and not seeing a doctor.

Life in their little corner of the world went on.

Markus was finding the carving extremely difficult. He only had the use of one hand, so he was balancing the piece of wood on his lap and using a knife to carve the letters with his right hand. Dave was struggling too, with his shoulder and had managed three. Jack had no such difficulties and had carved five. Markus was still on his first, and he wanted to get it right. He'd already scrapped three attempts.

Annnnd... It was done. There hadn't been much to put on it – no-one had known Patton's last name, or her date of birth, or anything else about her, so Markus had just put "Patton" with a crude carving of a daisy. He didn't really think Patton had liked daisies, but it had just been so blank that he'd had to add something, and he'd no idea what she had actually liked.

"Come on," Jack said. They stood up and crossed to where the graves were – brown mounds of earth interrupting the stretch of grass all around. Patton's grave was on the end, and Markus went over to it. He placed the wooden plaque right above where her head should be. And suddenly, he was extremely angry.

"I don't know who's buried where, I was busy having a bullet dug out of my shoulder!" Dave was complaining loudly.

"I don't remember either," Jack was saying. "Markus -"

But Markus interrupted him; "Where's Sarah? Is she back?"

"She's inside, I think. You alright?" Jack looked concerned.

"Yeah." Markus was anything but alright.

"What are you going to do?" Dave shouted after him, but Markus didn't answer. He didn't know what he was going to do.

He burst in the door. It slammed against the wall beside it with a bang, making John, at the computer, jump. Sarah was inside, eating something. She took one look at him and ordered "Outside. Now."

Markus obeyed without thinking, but when they got back outside, he wished he hadn't – he'd given her power over him.

Marita glanced at them briefly, but clearly decided her book was more interesting and went back to that.

"What?" Sarah barked at him.

Being angry at Sarah was not an easy thing to be, but Markus knew he was right. "Patton. You said you didn't know that it wasn't a trap, you didn't know that the message wasn't from the machines?"

Sarah shrugged in a "yeah, so what" sort of manner, and Markus just got more pissed.

"You thought it might be a trap, and you thought "Hey, let's send the twelve year old in!" She was a child. She had no business dodging bullets, or zip-lining off skyscrapers. She had no business saving me. She was a child."

For once, Sarah looked taken aback, but Markus didn't stay to let her defend herself. He just took off.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 5.47pm

They'd gotten so much more from the mart than anyone had expected. Everyone had recorded a message, or had a photo, or a drawing, a poem, a short story that they wanted sent back. George had taken over capturing the video, and had started compiling everything in the farmhouse.

Erica and John were in John's room. He was trying to figure out the tech from the communications room in the Skynet base. The tech that was supposed to make this all possible.

But he couldn't get it. There were firewalls or something, and John couldn't crack it. This was awful. So frustrating – they were so close, they had everything. They just needed some way to send it. And John's deadline was fast approaching.

There was a knock on the door. Erica knew who it was before she opened it, and as she did she started to protest "we just need five minutes, five minutes, please!"

Markus nodded. "Yeah, you've got, like, ten. I just wanted to see how it was going."

This surprised Erica, but the ten minutes passed in silence. And then five more passed.

"I'm sorry," Markus said – he actually sounded like he was. It was nearly ten past. "We've got to go John."

John stood up with an air of finality. Erica began to protest again, but John stopped her. "I'm running some decryption software. If that doesn't work, there's nothing more I'd be able to do anyway."

Erica nodded.

"I do have one request," John looked to Markus.

Erica had almost forgotten that for thirty years, these two men had been best friends.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 6.18pm

They were outside, right on top of the mountain. This was nothing like it had been this morning. The sky was orange, and pink and purple, and there were little clouds scattered around, illuminated by the sun that was about to set.

Most of the camp hadn't bothered to turn up. Nothing mattered to them anymore. But about fifty or so had. John Connor knelt before them, a look of resolute determination on his face. A look of bravery, Erica thought.

He hadn't set out to end the world, he had set out to save it. And he still might, or so Erica hoped.

Markus stood over him, pistol pointed straight at John's head. It looked like it was harder for him than for John, and Erica, recording, could have sworn the on-board mic picked up John saying, under his breath, so only Markus should have been able to hear "it's okay. You're right to do this. It's okay."

And Markus pulled the trigger. But by then, none of the crowd were paying attention – none of them saw John Connor leave the world. They were too busy staring at the road in the valley below.

The machines were coming.


	17. Chapter 17

Thursday 12th September 1996 – 10.27am

"You broke in, shot one of my security staff, threatened my employees and you expect me to watch this crap?"

"We only shot him in the foot. It was his fault really," Jack reasoned.

Sarah shot him a shut-up-or-I'll-shoot-you-too look.

"We'll take it somewhere else, and you'll regret it." She stared the executive down.

They were in a glass office, somewhere high above Manhattan. The view down was making Markus dizzy. Marita wasn't paying attention, she was waving down at the ant-sized people below.

"Seriously? From the future?"

"Ten minutes. John, play the tape."

"It doesn't really work like that mom. I have to -"

Sarah sighed, turned to him and said "get on with it then."

John ran around the other side of the desk. The executive allowed herself be rolled away by a helpful Jack and Dave. John pressed some buttons and connected some leads and did other computer-y things.

Whatever he did, it worked, and the video came up on the screen on the wall opposite.

There was no sound.

"Oh, you have to-" the executive started.

"Yeah, yeah," John said absently, and sound started blaring out of some nearby speakers. He quickly adjusted the volume and started the video again.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 6.22pm

They'd sealed themselves inside. It would take a while, even for the machines, to break through the doors, and another while to sweep the bunker for the small camp of humans hiding in the depths.

Walking back through the camp had been hard, seeing the word spread. Erica walked past the graveyard wall. The group were still there, still singing. Some were crying now, others hugging, holding one another. Some were on the floor.

Erica saw her mother's body. It lay there, just as she'd left it. She doubted it would move again now.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry, she wanted to tell the stupid singing people that it wouldn't do any good. Those they were singing for were dead now, and they'd be dead themselves soon enough.

As Erica watched, a teenage girl, one of her friends, flicked open a lighter. The girl reached out. She lit the corner of one of the pictures. The fire spread. In moments, the entire wall was alight.

Erica turned her back and walked away. There was no time.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 6.24pm

In John's room, Erica and Markus watched frantically as lines of code ran across the computer screen. Neither of them knew anything about computers, and they couldn't tell if they were good lines of code or bad ones.

To distract herself, Erica switched on the camera and began to interview Markus.

"You're old enough to remember before Judgement Day."

It wasn't a question, but Markus answered anyway;"Yup."

"Who were you? What were you doing with your life?"

"I used to do sports – water sports mostly, surfing, kayaking. Cycling too. And I was about to start college. Philosophy. Probably the most pointless degree there was."

"As a philosopher then, what's the biggest difference you've seen since Skynet took over?"

"For me... Before Judgement Day there was a trail of bodies following me around – the people who died because of me, the people I couldn't save. I used to count them, but after Judgement Day, the number got too big. I had to start counting the people who were still alive. The people that I still could save."

"And for everyone else?"

"Prejudice." He said it with a sort of finality, as though that was all there was to say about the matter, but Erica didn't get it. "Prejudice?"

"Yeah. It's gone. Nobody really believes in religion any more, nobody gives a damn about the colour of your skin or where you came from or who you fuck. Man, woman, man who wants to be a woman, woman who wants to be a man, somewhere in between? Doesn't matter. Hell, disabled people are war-heroes."

He laughed to himself. "We're all just human now. Who'da thunk? The machines made the humans better."

The computer made a sort of beeping noise, and Erica switched the camera off.

That was it! It was done! But the new information was about as confusing as the lines of code had been.

"George," Markus said, and Erica ran off to get her.

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 6.37pm

In the farmhouse, George was surrounded by mountains of paper, scanning furiously. The tape-deck was whirring away.

"Oh, good," George said, completely frazzled, as Erica came in.

"I'm nearly done. I've just about got everything scanned, I think-" she checked the screen "yeah, all the audio is uploaded."

"And there's" she checked the screen again "five minutes left in the video capturing. I'm all yours, what can I do?"

"Joan." Looking at George now, Erica had to confess. George deserved to know. "When we were leaving, I found Joan. She was trying to give me a message..." She trailed off. It was too hard.

"What was it?" George sounded like she could barely get the words out too.

"I... Um. I didn't hear it. There was a machine, and I..." Erica had never been so ashamed. "I got scared. I ran."

George nodded tersely. "You came to get me. Is it decrypted?"

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 6.45pm

"It's quite simple actually," George was saying.

There was a knock on Connor's bedroom door. One of the soldiers came in, without waiting for a response. "They're in."

The sort-of-relieved "we're all going to be okay" atmosphere went out the window. There was silence as they all realized they were about to die a short painful death, and the human race would end.

This plan of theirs – their Ark, their black box, their swansong, their hail mary pass – there was no guarantee that it would work, no reason, beyond blind hope, that it could. And they were all going to have to die before it could work anyway.

"I'll be there in a minute," Markus said. The soldier nodded and went back out the door.

"Quickly," Markus commanded.

"They're sorted by date and mission – this one's in nineteen-eighty-four, trying to kill Sarah Connor," George pointed. "So when do you want me to send it? Day before Judgement Day?"

"Wait, why would we send it the day before Judgement Day?" Erica questioned "Shouldn't we give them, like, a year?" And then it dawned on her. It was so obvious, so stupid. This could never, would never work.

"This technology was used to communicate directly with the machines in the past, right?" she said. "So it goes directly into the machine's heads? Why the hell would they give any of this information to anyone that could help us?" How had no-one seen this flaw in the plan before?

George's face fell. All of this. All of it, had been for nothing. All of those people had died for nothing. They were all about to die for nothing. There was no way to stop Judgement Day.

For the people in the past, this would happen all over again.

But Markus smiled. And then he laughed. "There was a machine hunting me, late August, nineteen-ninety-six. Find it."

George nodded, she'd got it.

"Okay, send the info to him, second of September, around nine at night. John had the damn thing's head cracked open."

"How do you possibly remember that?" Erica doubted him. It was a weirdly specific date and time.

"It was the day – never-mind; I do. That's what matters. Just send it."

He started to walk out the room, saying "I'll give you as much time as I can." Then he stopped, "actually, I need you to send another message too."

* * *

Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 6.52pm

"They're getting closer," George warned.

Erica started recording. There were noises in the distance – gunshots, explosions, screaming.

"I don't have a lot of time. Whoever gets this message, whoever Sackhoff told me to send it to -" George was waving to get her attention. She gave Erica a thumbs up – the broadcast had started, they were transmitting to the past.

"You have to get it out there, people have to see. It's the only way to stop all this." Erica indicated around her. "We've sent back as much as we could, records, reports."

This wasn't going well, Erica knew. She'd said exactly nothing useful so far. Her head hurt.

"I'm explaining this badly. It's 2029. The human race is currently being wiped out in the hallway next to this room. We made a documentary over the last few days, you have to get it shown back then, in 1996."

There was an explosion somewhere behind her, and she glanced around nervously. "Judgement Day is coming. Soon. You can stop it."

And she switched the camera off, took out the tape and handed it to George.

"It's the last thing we're transmitting," George said, as she loaded it into the tape deck, "so it should be the first thing they see."

"How long will it take?" Erica asked.

"Ten minutes. Ish." George shrugged, "it's hard to know for sure."

There was nothing to do. They listened to the noises get closer and closer. The broadcast was doing it's thing – twenty-seven percent, thirty-two, fourty-seven.

It got stuck at sixty-two percent for a full two minutes. Nothing mattered to Erica more at that moment than the little green squares on that screen, indicating how much information had been transmitted.

There was an explosion in the hall, right outside the door. The number jumped – eighty-nine percent.

The door burst open. A machine, tall, silver, shiny. It was holding a gun – no, its hand was the gun. Ninety-two.

It burst into sporadic fire.

There was a sort of thud in Erica's stomach. She looked down. Blood was spreading, slowly, across her jumper.

Ninety-seven percent.

She hit the floor. The machine turned to go – it's job was done. The human race was extinct.

Ninety-nine percent.

* * *

Monday 23rd September 1996 – 6.00pm

"In our top story tonight, the last episode of the five-part documentary mini-series "The End" is set to air tonight.

It sparked huge controversy last week when the people who brought it to the attention of our network claimed it came from the future. The details of how exactly it got here are still unclear, but having seen the first four episodes, many are speculating that it is not a hoax.

The documentary is supported by a wealth of files, also claimed to come from the future, which were posted on the internet with little fanfare two and a half weeks ago. The content of the files includes messages to loved ones, photographs and military and historical reports. The reports fill in the history of the world between what is being called "Judgement Day" and the year twenty-twenty-nine.

"Judgement Day", according to this new unverified information, is the day when the already controversial Skynet programme comes online, becomes self-aware and begins attempts to exterminate the human race.

President Sansom, at the end of his second week in office, has halted all work on the in-development Skynet programme which was set to take control of the entirety of the nations missiles once completed. He has also ordered a complete report on all technology related to the Skynet programme and an investigation into the source of the documentary and the supporting material that can be found online.

Work on the project, President Sansom said in a statement released this afternoon, will not resume until all parties are satisfied that it will not become self-aware and start a nuclear holocaust."

In other news, the riots said to be linked to the release of this information are on-going in several major cities in America and many more around the world. More on that after this."


	18. Epilogue

John Connor Interview – Monday 15th October 2029

"Life means nothing to them."

He held his hand up high. "They're up here, and we-" He gestured abstractly "We don't exist to most of them. Most of them see us the way we'd see a cold – mildly annoying, but we'll be rid of it soon."

"And the rest of them? You mean Alison, don't you? What does she think?"

* * *

December 4th 2006 – 5.15pm

Patton stopped by the impossibly tall column, halfway across the square – the palace in front of her was huge, beautiful, imposing. Eighteen century architecture, columns and rows and rows of windows. It was painted a duck egg blue and the golden accents glinted in the low Russian winter light; it was getting dark now.

Her breath condensed in front of her – even with three layers of warm clothes and a hat it was freezing. Her feet crunched the snow under-foot; they'd walked down the embankment and the river had frozen, hard. It almost looked like you could walk across.

"It's closing Patton! Come on, before we die!"

* * *

John Connor Interview – Monday 15th October 2029

"My mother? She was tough."

"On you?"

"On everyone."

"But you loved her."

"I worshipped the ground she walked on."

* * *

Saturday 14th July 2007 – 11.32am

Machines beeped. There was a screen with some squiggly lines. A drip was hooked up to Sarah's arm, pumping poison into her veins. She sat back in her seat and looked at the tiled ceiling.

"In other news, Jack Beattie, Dave Martial and Marita Tolstaia were arrested last night in connection with several armed robberies of banks in the Washington area over the last few months," the radio prattled. No-one was listening.

Sarah was starting to doze off a little, when the nurse came up.

"Sorry, blood pressure-" he began. Sarah nodded and held out her arm.

The nurse started to chat; they always did. "Any family coming to visit soon?" he asked absently, his mind on the task at hand.

Sarah shook her head "Only child, parents are dead and I never had kids."

"Oh, I didn't mean-" he said uncomfortably as he took her wrist and stared at his watch.

"No, it's fine. I'm used to being alone."

* * *

John Connor Interview – Monday 15th October 2029

"If you could do anything different, knowing what you know now, what would it be?"

Connor thought about this for a minute.

"My life – from childhood, I always knew we were heading for this, always knew I'd have to lead humanity in the end..."

"So?"

"I'd have fun. Before the world ended, I'd have some fun."

* * *

Sunday 3rd May 2009 – 10.42am

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been ten days since my last confession."

"Go on," the priest sounded bored – he'd been listening to people's so called sins for hours. Mostly, old parishioners confessed to wishing their neighbour's dog would be hit by a car, or stealing ten cents from the collection plate.

Cecilia smiled. Time to wake him up.

* * *

John Connor Interview – Monday 15th October 2029

"Markus was like an older brother to me – tried to teach me to surf once."

"Before Judgement Day?"

Connor shook his head "Just after. We were on this deserted beach in Southern Chile."

"What happened?"

"I was just getting the hang of it – I'd managed to stand up a couple of times."

"Then-?"

"Then a plane flew overhead. We didn't know if it was one of us or one of them, so we dropped everything and ran."

* * *

Saturday 24th August 2013 – 2.15pm

A child screamed in the yard. Markus stopped and listened carefully. No, he was pretty sure it was a happy scream. If it wasn't, one of them would surely run in to get him.

Before he started playing again, he took a moment to look at the photo of a woman on top of the piano. She was young, and quite pretty, but even then she was starting to look sick. He stretched out and touched it.

"God, I miss you," he told her, under his breath.

He started at the beginning of the phrase and played right through, but it didn't have an end yet. He jotted down some notes on the sheet music. Then he played it again.

That's it, he thought. It's done.

* * *

John Connor Interview – Monday 15th October 2029

"Relationships?" Connor was slightly wistful. "I never let anyone get close. Before Judgement Day – well, would you have let yourself get attached, knowing what was coming?"

"And after?"

"After... Well, I'm John Connor, amen't I? Anyone mad enough to want to date me, well, they were mad enough that I didn't want to date them."

* * *

Monday 31st October 2022 – 11.49pm

Ugh, this is awful, Joan thought. She just wanted to get back to the dorm; she had a paper due Friday, and she'd barely started the research. Besides, with the heat from the stuffy bar, and the ill-fitting mask, she was finding it hard to breathe.

"Music's horrible, isn't it?" A voice came from beside her – she turned around to see what seemed to be a slutty RAF pilot.

The music was probably the only thing Joan didn't object to, so she shrugged politely and started to leave, but the girl grabbed her arm.

"Don't go. At least let me buy you a drink. I'm Gina."

She was good-looking... "Gina? I'm Joan."

"It's Georgina actually, but I hate the George bit."

* * *

John Connor Interview – Monday 15th October 2029

Connor looked past the camera, at the interviewer:

"You were there in the corridor when they beat Alison?"

"Yes."

"She can feel pain you know. They feel things, physical things. Like pleasure. Like pain," he said it, completely matter of fact.

"Why didn't she fight back?"

"When I remade her, I made her so she couldn't hurt humans.

* * *

Monday 5th September 2016 – 7.30am

Collette snapped a picture on her phone. "Could you try to smile, please sweetheart?"

"Mom! They're not going to like me! And Neil said the teacher is really mean! And my school bag is too heavy! Can I just stay here, with you?"

Erica was so cute, Collette thought; she had little pigtails and a very cross expression.

"You'll be fine. We've got to get going, don't want to be late on your first day."

* * *

John Connor Interview – Monday 15th October 2029

"Don't you see though? We were always headed for this. There's no stopping it. You can't stop progress. The technology that causes Judgement Day will always be invented, sooner or later. The best we can do is delay it a little."

* * *

Tuesday 16th September 2029 – 6.18pm

Teabags. Milk? Milk milk milk milk milk. There! Milk!

Mr. Sansom bustled around the kitchen; they'd be here any minute, and he wanted to be ready. There was a ringing – his phone, in the living room.

He crossed, humming happily to himself, and picked it up with a fake deep husky voice "Hullo?"

"Not the time dad."

"Oh, are you nearly here? I don't have any sweets for the kids."

"Have you been watching the news?"

"No, why?"

"Just turn it on. We're not coming, I'm taking them back home."

She hung up. Mr. Sansom's heart fell – he only got to see his grand-kids about once a year, they lived on the opposite side of the country. Whatever it was, it couldn't be that bad, could it? He switched on the TV.

"We've received unconfirmed reports – oh, actually," the news reporter looked off screen "that's confirmation now. Berlin, London, Washington, Dallas and New York have been hit. We don't know who, we don't know why, as of yet. Stay tuned for more updates."

Mr. Sansom was seriously glad he wasn't president any-more.

"We are under attack."


End file.
